Disappearing, Once Again
Performance
New Space Arts Foundation, Huế, Vietnam
Photographs courtesy of New Space Arts Foundation
May 6, 2025
In Disappearing, Once Again, the act of spitting is reimagined as an offering rather than a gesture of rejection. The performance unfolds as a ritual—cyclical, intimate, and intentional. I direct my saliva, a unique and unrepeatable biological trace, into a ceramic vase. Here, spitting becomes a symbolic transfer: the externalization of something deeply personal, offered as a living tribute. The vase used is not a neutral object. I purchased it in a market in Huế, where I have lived for some time. In Vietnamese culture, such vases are often used in ancestral worship, functioning as symbolic vessels that bridge the living and the dead. By integrating this object into the performance, I appropriate its cultural weight to pay homage to a dear friend who recently passed away. The action culminates as I place the vase on my head, my face covered by black gauze. After holding it in stillness, I lower my head: the vase falls and shatters. This rupture reinforces the themes of fragility and transformation—states that are intrinsic to the human experience. In the final gesture, I gather the fragments and attempt to construct a new form. This act does not seek restoration but rather gestures toward renewal—toward the possibility of beginning again. Rooted in the body and the symbolic, Disappearing, Once Again invites reflection on loss, memory, and the enduring capacity to rebuild.
