Rear Window Performance Series
Next Performance
Performance by Miao Jiaxin
Thursday, November 15, 9pm
Please RSVP for entry instructions at email.glasshouse@gmail.com | $10 Suggested
Jiaxin’s Next Performance series began in 2014. Each Next Performance begins in a space where a white clothed table is placed in front of a white wall, and the performance artist shows up empty handed however slowly turns himself to be a magician.
Miao Jiaxin brings his Next Performance to Glasshouse’s ‘Rear Window’ Performance Series. Miao's works often express the ambivalent and sometimes antagonistic tension that always exists between the individual and governing or cultural authorities, questioning assumptions about power in relation to identity politics. He posits the artist's nature as one who transgresses boundaries, challenges consensus, and stays distance from authorities.
About The Series
‘Rear Window’ performance series attempts to challenge both the audience and performer, focusing the invited gaze through a residential window exposes participants to the "social contagion" of acting as voyeurs/spectacle; an attempt to explore the very act of looking and being looked at once isolated from the gallery/theater setting and planted in the everyday realm.
The window serves as a frame of the performance as well as the surface separating between audience and performer, giving a film-like experience of the event.
This series follows last year’s ‘Wednesdays’ weekly performance broadcast series, hosting performances which rotated between four domestic spaces of the Glasshouse- living room, kitchen, bath and bed- each offering a different angle on practicing, hosting, teaching and learning performance. The previous year Glasshouse initiated the Neo Domesticity Performance Art Festival- a durational 100 consecutive hours performance festival, hosting works by 50 local and international artists all happening at the Glasshouse residence. With 'Rear Window' Glasshouse further explore performance at the domestic sphere.
About The Artist
Beginning in Shanghai, where his photography works expressed the universal theme of urban angst, Miao then immigrated to New York, expanding his view of urban streets towards a more conceptual public stage. Among his performative practices across different media, Miao has blended his naked body into the bleak streets of a midnight New York City, traveled inside a suitcase hauled by his mother through urban crowds, made live-feed erotic performances on an interactive pornographic broadcasting website, and dressed as a Chinese businessman for an entire year when working towards his MFA at School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He is more widely known for converting his New York studio into a jail and charging $1 per night as accommodation on Airbnb. The same studio later was converted again to be a blind dating (meeting) spot, as well as a massage therapy clinic. Most of his projects could be found at http://www.miaojiaxin.com/pageviewer.html.