20SEPT2025: a conversation between artist Zheng Bo and evolutionary ornithologist and biologist Richard Prum and performance artist Anh Vo, tending to topics converging around the natural world and dance in Zheng Bo’s exhibition Vibrancy, Vibrancy, Vibrancy, on view at Kiang Malingue New York (September 17-November 1, 2025)
My whole career has revolved around these works of people having sex with ferns. It started almost randomly, but it shaped everything. Museums still mainly want to show sex.
Zheng Bo
A larger body can produce more eggs, so it makes sense. If the female dies, the largest male transitions into a female, and new clownfish are recruited as larvae. They never leave the anemone—it’s their protection. That’s the real queer side of Finding Nemo.
Richard Prum
The body is not an “I,” nor is it “mine.” The insistence on the body as private property of the individualised subject creates an energetic blockage.
Anh Vo
Transcriptrecorded on 20.09.2025
Zheng Bo (ZB): So I thought, your book The Evolution of Beauty, you know, it was published in 2017, right? So I listened to the audiobook, I think, three years ago, and now it has become the book that I listened to, and I think now I kind of know what I’m doing as an artist. I mentioned to you in the exhibition that some of what the fish was saying is exactly what you say in The Evolution of Beauty. I was very surprised that very few people in the art world have read it and studied it. You know, it’s been eight years, and I think—since I’m teaching—I think everyone in the art world should read it. So I’m really grateful that we have the chance to meet in person and also to start the conversation.
Richard Prum (RP): Well, the aspiration of the book is to try to bring both scientists and humanists into awareness of the role of subjective experience of animals in their lives, and therefore to challenge the way we think about ourselves as aesthetic subjects and, you know, observers. And this is exactly why I’m here today, because, you know, you want more and more people to have the opportunity to think in a new way.
ZB: Before we start, I should—you know—how many people have seen this video? You… yeah, yeah, yeah, you saw, I saw it online. I haven’t seen the actual bird. Okay, so maybe before we start, maybe we’ll play the video, and then this is what you’ve been doing for how many years of your life.
RP: So, yeah, this is actually the video of a superb bird-of-paradise. It was taken by one of my students, Ed Scholes, who’s now sort of semi-retired from Cornell University. And it’s a superb bird-of-paradise in New Guinea. And this is a display of a resident male. So go ahead and get that, huh? Well, you know, this shows an amazing transformation between the bird, a male, in his everyday life, and the moment of encounter with a potential mate. And here we see the female arriving at his log, right, and she’s regarding him at a really intimate distance—centimeters, millimeters. And he has erected this ruff of feathers with these two amazing colors on them, the blue and the black. And he’s actually making a snapping noise with his wings. So this is pure choreography. And the millions of years of mate choice in this process—this is an example of the challenge that biology poses to our ability to describe it. And of course, scientists have been thinking about this since Darwin in 1871, but there’s still a way to go. In this case, most people who look at this think of explaining those ornaments as symbols of quality, like he’s showing how good he is, right? Communicating actionable details. But the alternative is that it’s what I would call merely beautiful—except that seems to denigrate the beauty—but in other words, the function is a subjective delight, the pleasure that it brings to the chooser, right?
ZB: I think it’s interesting to have this conversation here, because, you know, I visited you yesterday at Yale, and you work in the lab. You know, you have colleagues who are scientists, right? So I think when you look at this, clearly, it’s beautiful, but I think many of your colleagues think exactly like we were saying—many of your colleagues see this and think about fitness and fecundity—and you want to influence them to see the aesthetic agency. Your words, right? I said, an agency.
RP: What these and many other pieces of data from the natural world show is that we need to actually incorporate a concept of beauty, of subjective response to display, to song, to flowers, to come up with an accurate scientific description of the world. These are not different domains that require different disciplines, but broadly one. And so this led me to do at least initially interdisciplinary work, but now I would just describe it as undisciplined. We go where we need to address the questions we have. And I think that has made me, over time, become comfortable in a science lab and in a gallery as a common laboratory for intellectual engagement with the world.
ZB: I think for us, you know, we’re going to have a conversation about dance in particular, right? I think I’m sure for you, you see this as dance, right? I see this as—I’m sure many people see this. I think for this particular audience, no one’s thinking about fitness, I guarantee you. No one’s thinking about fitness. No one’s thinking about fecundity, right? But I think what I want to bring in my world—you know, this is kind of the art world—what I want to bring the art world towards is the same: to see the aesthetic agency of nonhumans. Because your colleagues study nonhumans—you want them to see the aesthetic agency, not just the evolutionary framework based on fitness—and I want my world to see that aesthetic agency is not just possessed by us humans, but also possessed by birds and plants. So I think we kind of converge toward that goal.
RP: I describe some of the work because this has led to essentially aesthetic philosophy. You know, what I would describe as a post-human aesthetic framework in which we create common tools that can be used to analyze displays like this and others much more subtle—and this is admittedly quite outrageous—but also human arts. So I taught a course called The Evolution of Beauty: From Warblers to Warhol where I was attempting to capture that. And the idea is that this makes contributions both to the science and to the art world, to become—as you see in your own work—aware of the agency of animals.
ZB: Maybe before we… okay, let me… So I think sometimes, you know, you said you want to change how people think, okay. I often think I’m not an artist, I’m a preacher, okay? But I often feel—in my own case too—it’s very difficult to change how someone thinks, unless you spend a lot of time in a completely different setting. You know, we’re here, talking about the bird-of-paradise—where could we be further away from the bird-of-paradise? I think if I only live in a space like this, I would see representations, but I would never really sense the beauty of the nonhumans. I would never really see how they dance, how they sing, right? So it’s very difficult to convince someone in a very different setting. So when I read your book, I was very curious, not just about the ideas, but also, how did you become this scientist who has been doing amazing scientific work, but you’re kind of departing from your colleagues, right? You’re leaving them. I’m sure they think you’re weird, right? Guaranteed. What happened, you know? Why did you become so interested in the idea of beauty?
RP: Yeah, well, I mean, I think it’s incremental. For me, it comes about as a consequence. The reason I’m in science is that I started birdwatching at the age of 10, and I never considered anything else, right? And it just keeps rolling out.
ZB: Do you remember the first bird you saw?
RP: You know, I remember what I was really inspired by was a book, which is not surprising—a nerdy kid reads too many books, right? But just the field guide. The field guide was a bridge—seeing maps, the paintings of the birds, the text—and realizing I could see immediately from the book and imagine all the places you would have to go, all the experiences you would have to have in order to know all of these birds personally. And it was just the adventure, the diversity, the captivating colors. It was the whole thing, and I was all in almost immediately. And so what that led to was taking birds seriously, and that has led, I guess, to this undisciplined path, which includes, you know, we’ve done a lot of optics. So on that bird itself, a lot of our work has been on this and other similar species—on the physics of those blue colors, which are not pigmentary like paints, but optical, like a rainbow, or an oil slick, or an opal gem. And also we did work on the microstructures of the surface of the black feathers, which are among the blackest objects ever measured in nature. They absorb the light that shines on them to give this incredible contrast. Look how black the black surrounding that blue is. The camera can’t even deal with it, right? Because it’s such a challenge optically. So we go as nerdy and science-y as we can. But clearly, the way to understand why this has evolved, of course, is to account for her choices, right? And for her ability—her freedom of choice—which is really what has led to this detail. So I’m just curious, and luckily I didn’t lose too many interests as my science education went on. And so when the opportunity came, I’ve been eager to go in these directions, and it’s exhilarating, right?
ZB: You know, I visited you. I saw the bird collection. I’ve seen birds in my life, but seeing the birds so close—almost every bird was beautiful to me, and every bird has such complex form and colors. So I said, you know, you—you have how many birds in the…?
RP: Over 150,000.
ZB: Over 150,000 birds in the Yale collection. Yeah. So I said, okay, well, it’s hard to bring something from your collection. So I said, maybe if you can bring a feather.
RP: So we brought a feather today. But, you know, it’s sort of emblematic of exactly what I was talking about—hierarchy of complexity. And by hierarchy, I don’t mean social relations, but nestedness: things within things, within things, leading to an emergent structure. And really it is about that emergent thing. And so, yeah, we’re doing lots of detailed science, but with an aspiration never to deny or reduce other kinds of complexity. And that’s also a feature that’s different from a lot of science.
RP: In wrasses, you see something similar. But with clownfish, it’s different: they start small as males, and the largest clownfish in the colony becomes female.
ZB: Oh, the largest becomes the female?
RP: Exactly. A larger body can produce more eggs, so it makes sense. If the female dies, the largest male transitions into a female, and new clownfish are recruited as larvae. They never leave the anemone—it’s their protection. That’s the real queer side of Finding Nemo.
ZB: Right. What struck me is that clownfish sex is determined by social cues. In humans, we frame trans identity as an internal, individual decision. But here, it’s entirely social, collective.
RP: Exactly. The social environment triggers neural signals that reshape reproductive capacity. The brain, gonads, and behavior are anciently connected. And our gonads are homologous with theirs—they come from the same ancestral structures.
ZB: So… do we have the potential to do that?
RP: That’s a frontier in trans medicine. Fish show us that gonads begin pluripotent—they can become ovaries or testes depending on molecular signals. Genes don’t just activate one pathway; they suppress the other. Fish exploit that plasticity, flipping gonadal identity. Humans share those pathways, so it’s worth studying.
ZB: So maybe no surgery, just genetic pathways?
RP: It’s more complicated in mammals—internal plumbing, live birth, etc. Fish are simpler. But yes, it suggests new directions for thinking about gonad identity. And that’s why I sometimes borrow the language of “performance”: gene expression isn’t passive, it’s enacted.
ZB: Okay, let’s go back to sex and aesthetics. My whole career has revolved around these works of people having sex with ferns. It started almost randomly, but it shaped everything. Museums still mainly want to show sex. Then I read your book, and I thought: maybe sexual selection is the justification. Because it links sex and beauty, right?
RP: Absolutely. Your fern work is interspecies, which is fascinating. Ferns aren’t even seed plants—they reproduce by spores. But interspecies sexual dynamics aren’t unique to art. In nature, you see orchids mimicking female insects so males attempt to mate with them. That pseudo-copulation transfers pollen.
ZB: Right, so the orchid pretends to be a female wasp, the male humps it, sometimes even ejaculates, and the pollen gets stuck on his head. Then he flies to another orchid.
RP: Exactly. And what’s amazing is that the male comes back again—it’s not just a one-time mistake. The performance has to be aesthetically convincing enough to be repeated. Darwin already studied this in orchids, and it scandalized Victorian science. His insistence that desire—not just survival—shapes evolution was radical.
ZB: That reminds me of Hokusai’s print Ama and the Two Octopuses. It’s erotic, grotesque, and political at once. When I later saw it, I thought—what I’m doing with fish and plants isn’t so crazy. It’s been in nature and in art for centuries. But your book focuses on mate choice within a species. What about cross-species attraction? Humans are clearly drawn to the beauty of other species—birds, fish, corals, flowers. Darwin didn’t really go there, did he?
RP: He did, in a way. Think of flowers. Animal-pollinated flowers are artworks—they evolved to be aesthetically compelling, rewarding, memorable. My definition of art is: communication that co-evolves with its evaluation. Flowers are artworks in that sense. And humans appreciating them is another layer of interspecies aesthetics. We also love birdsong, which is music in its own right.
ZB: So pollination isn’t just utilitarian?
RP: Not at all. People often highlight tight co-dependencies—like yucca and yucca moths—but in most cases, there’s choice, variety, preference. For the insect, a garden is like a grocery store: some flowers are quick snacks, others memorable delicacies. That’s aesthetic judgment. Darwin spent years studying this—he knew that mate choice and pollination couldn’t be reduced to pure utility.
ZB: I feel that tension in myself. When I see tropical fish or corals, I immediately perceive beauty, not just fitness. But in urban life, surrounded by impoverished environments, it’s harder. You fall into a utilitarian mindset, and beauty disappears. It becomes a vicious cycle. As an artist, I want to retrain myself. Even in New York, walking down the street—when I see a bee on a flower, I don’t want to think “function.” I want to feel it as an aesthetic event.
RP: That’s exactly how I live, after decades of birdwatching. Seeing beauty as agency enriches life. But historically, science and culture pushed back against this. Beauty was threatening. So people reframed it as utility—especially in Protestant, capitalist societies. Desire was dangerous, so it was domesticated as function. That legacy still shapes science, and even the arts.
ZB: And what about your students? They come to Yale expecting equations and lab work, not lessons on beauty. How do you convert them?
RP: Maybe I don’t convert them all, but at least I make them thoughtful. Many haven’t heard this before—the dominant story is still “beauty means better genes.” That narrative damages people, especially adolescents who internalize every variation as a flaw. In reality, diversity is the point. Beauty isn’t about flawlessness, it’s about desire, choice, and variation. And once students see that, it changes how they experience life.
ZB: You asked me about the art situation. Often when I show my video work, I’ll pair it with freely available YouTube footage of pseudo-copulation—bees or wasps mating with orchids. I like showing them side by side. But it makes me think: how can museums become more than just places where humans show art for human audiences? There’s clearly art and aesthetics beyond the human world. I try to address this, but I’m not sure how yet.
RP: Maybe propose an exhibition that includes artworks co-produced by multiple agents—plants, animals, nonhumans alongside humans.
ZB: Or even a live performance—imagine if we had the right orchids, attracting the right wasps, performing together in the museum.
RP: That might be hard to manage with orchids, but as video, yes.
ZB: Great idea. Okay, let’s stop here and open to questions.
Audience: Thank you both. I haven’t read your book yet, but I want to now. Could you speak more about nestedness as an emergent strategy? You said aesthetics is a natural process and desire a motivator. How is that studied?
RP: Think of how conservators study paintings. They analyze pigments—chromium here, a fading pigment there—or x-ray to reveal earlier sketches. You can treat an artwork as a whole, but also as layers of materials and revisions. Biotic artworks—like bird plumage—are similar. Some colors are pigment-based, like paints; others are structural, requiring intricate material organization. Selection can act at any of these levels. And of course, life itself is hierarchical—multicellular bodies made from trillions of coordinated cells. That layered complexity creates endless aesthetic possibilities.
Audience: You spoke about nonhuman agency. At your opening, you described visiting the same spot daily, watching the same fish, which eventually got used to you. How do you actually study nonhuman agency?
RP: As a scientist, it’s easier to study the artworks than the judgments. We can’t easily know what a bird is thinking. But by comparing ornaments across related species, we can see the products of their choices—norms changing, being conserved, or radically transformed. That’s how I approach it.
ZB: For me, it’s about sensing. Agency is always there; the task is to recognize it. But words like “recognition” are legalistic, heavy. That’s why I turn to art—to sense what can’t be put into language. It takes time. I go to the same reef day after day until something is revealed, until I sense it. Maybe that’s not so different from you, though your methodology is scientific.
RP: True. That video of the bird dancing on a log? It was the product of weeks of waiting at that same spot.
ZB: So, how do you approach nonhuman agency?
Audience member: I think it’s about attention—time. In today’s attention economy, everything is fast. But to truly attend to something is to slow down, to cultivate empathy by imagining another perspective. That seems like a practice of acknowledging agency.
Audience: We’re living through unprecedented times. What lessons can the natural world teach us for navigating them?
RP: Conservation isn’t just about ecosystem services like oxygen or food. Habitats are art worlds in their own right. With aesthetic agency comes ethical responsibility to preserve them—even those we never see. For me, growing orchids, potatoes, or tomatoes is part of that commitment.
ZB: I laugh because when we ask what nature can “teach” us, that’s already anthropocentric. I used to feel anxious about crisis, but now I see anxiety itself as human-centered. Evolution isn’t linear—it rises and falls. This is the sixth mass extinction. I don’t have children; you do. But maybe it isn’t so terrible if another evolutionary path takes over.
RP: That interpretation is certainly consistent with Earth’s history.
ZB: Of course, I don’t mean to sound careless—like those who treat collapse as a market opportunity. But in my daily practice, when I watch fish or you watch birds, it’s not about lessons. It’s about joy, beauty, pleasure. If the university lets me, I’ll go see fish every day. They don’t need to teach me anything. They just enrich my life.
PART 2
Anh Vo & Zheng Bo
Anh Vo (AV): So you asked me to read something as a little introduction. I also want to respond a little bit to what has been circulating in the room and the thoughts you’ve shared, because I feel like I’m going to go in a very different direction. But I think we are all striving for the same thing.
Oh my god, where am I going?
I deeply struggle with plants, nature, and ecology as an embodied experience, even though I intellectually and philosophically believe in it so deeply. I think my way of grappling with it, and you’ll hear this in the text, is to decentralize the human through a kind of ritualistic murder. That has been my way of finding connection to nature: coming to terms with the limits of human perception, and the arrogance of what it means to be an individual subject, by turning to rituals.
Because rituals, for me, carry historical, ancient knowledge that teaches you how to realize how small you are, as a little being in the world—and not get caught up in your own fantasy of who you are and what you’re capable of.
The text I’m reading, I wrote last year, after performing a year-long series of possession rituals—my own way of doing it in a contemporary art context (which is a whole thing). I’m really going into my memories of attending possession rituals in northern Vietnam. I’m grounding it in northern Vietnamese ritual forms—and also in not really understanding what I was seeing. Not being grounded in it, feeling alienated from it, while also being totally drawn to it.
So this text should be taken as a crystallization of thoughts and reflection, not a “how-to” for doing possession rituals. Though, some of that is there too, I think. But it’s really the result of a full year of performing, basically every week.
And I hope you can hear that kind of embodiment in the text, even though it’s written in a very academic tone. That’s why I’m talking a bit before reading—to soften the blow of this psychoanalytic-performance-theory thing I’m about to drop on you.
Okay—so this is Possession Rituals.
The title is:
Some Hypotheses on Being Possessed: The Body as a Vessel.
(Footnote: this is also a very Qigong thing: to think of the body not as a physical entity, or an individualized object you’re in control of, but as a vessel. My teacher would always say: “The meridians come first, and your physical matter forms around them.” Meridians aren’t on the body, they precede it.)
So with that in mind:
If being possessed refers to the capacity of being inhabited by forces of otherness, there must be no fixed internal core to the body. The body is not an “I,” nor is it “mine.” The insistence on the body as private property of the individualized subject creates an energetic blockage. Interpolated by this sensorial stratification, ghostly otherness is banished to the realm of noisy superstition. But just because all one hears is noise does not mean the spirits are not speaking through the body. In a way, the ongoing maintenance of the individualized self can be analyzed as a never-ending exorcising process, one that tries to expel what is constitutively not-me as not-me, in order to fabricate an illusion of coherence. As powerful as they are, rituals of exorcism only buy time. They cannot entirely stop the dead from haunting the living, or the otherness of the Other from encroaching upon the “I.” Within the biopolitical regime of make live and let die, compulsively fixated on life, administration, optimization, exorcising death has become even more urgent. A paradox arises: The more we try to extend life, the more we become haunted by death.
[pauses]
I want to stop there for a little bit. Maybe we can talk, and I can read more after. I just don’t want to bombard too much at once. I guess what I’m trying to write about in this context, is the way that when I perform being possessed, there’s so much fetish around exorcism, around catharsis, around purging. Which, I think, is the same fantasy people project when they turn to “the more-than-human.” This idea that in the ritual, you get to lose yourself. In nature, you get to lose yourself. You get to become something else. Which, to me, and I don’t know how you relate to this, has so much to do with how we are so arrested by performing a self all the time that it becomes easy, when turning to artistic or conceptual work, to swing to the other extreme and fetishize the idea of losing oneself entirely. So I felt a need to framing exorcism as a kind of OCD maintenance of the self, rather than cathartic.
Zheng Bo ZB: It’s a little darker, so I’ll show… These are images from a dance this past summer, in the forest. It was very bright. I think when I read your text, we weren’t thinking about rituals. and of course, we were not thinking about being possessed or about being possessed. But maybe, maybe before we talk about something very, you know, harder to articulate, I’ll just tell you one little detail. I don’t know how to explain it. Maybe you know, or maybe Richard has a scientific perspective, or maybe you have a perspective from the ritual possession side.
So, you know, there are many—this is a forest in Finland—and there are many anthills. This is a huge anthill. There are many of them in the forest. I can talk about the science later, but just about the experience: we were trying to develop a dance sequence around the anthill. It was very cold (it’s not Vietnam, right?) so it was very cold, and the dancers had clothes on.
We were trying… and the ants were really angry. So they bit… you know, I was there… so they bit us like crazy. It kind of makes sense, right?
And then, as we started to feel more comfortable with the movement, the dancers took their clothes off. (This isn’t from that moment—this is later.)
AV: How cold are we talking here?
ZB: 15 degrees Celsius, and but somehow, when the dancers took their clothes off, the ants stop biting.
AV: And Richard, do you have any speculation?
ZB: So we were shocked, but we, you know, we thought about many possible reasons. I won’t go through them all, but I still don’t know. I haven’t talked to an insect person, maybe there’s a reason. But I’m also curious, you know? As I was listening to you talk about possession… maybe—albeit—we actually had our clothes on when we were possessed, right? I never thought about this before. So maybe this, when we talk about possession, this is possession. But of course, that may not be what you’re talking about. Sorry, that’s just what came to my mind.
But I think, maybe taking it closer to what you’re talking about—I think, you know, Richard—I visited Richard yesterday, and we talked. Often when I show a work like this, people want to hear me talk like a new-agey person. They want to hear me say, “Oh yeah, the trees told me to do this,” right? But that’s not what I feel. I don’t think the trees told me to do this, yeah? And I think that’s kind of related to what you were saying, right?
I was thinking about this dilemma: we don’t want to… I mean, you wrote about this too in one of your texts, right? “How Not to Write Like a White Man,” yeah. You know, you studied here, I studied here. The language is so rational, so critical. So even the way we’re talking now, it’s such a problem because we’re using this grammar, this vocabulary, this sentiment. It’s all so rational, rational, critical.
We want to move away from that, but we also don’t want to move into the sort of transcendental realm. So there’s something in-between. I think that’s where your thinking lives. I mean, you’re not only a dancer, but also a writer. So have you thought about this, about where we’re going?
AV: I mean, I think it’s very related to, I don’t know why art is having such a problem today. It feels very related to this image you shared, of everyone taking their clothes off and the ants stopping biting. To me, that speaks to this kind of unruly logic of the body.
It sounds so abstract when you say it like that, “the body and its unruliness,” but I think it also speaks to your question about agency. Like, how do you get there?
And I think the body feels like that thing where, if you’re just in your body, if you’re actually following your curiosity, your desire, your sexual kind of arousal, with some reflection, I do think it gets to…
Oh my god, I’m losing my train of thought in real time.
AV: Let me ask you a question, did you dance with the dancers?
ZB: in someways, yeah.
AV: what was that experience for you?
ZB: I still have anxiety, so I haven’t danced in front of… well, this was actually a project where people could come and watch, so I didn’t dance with the dancers when the audience was there. But I really enjoyed being part of it when we were alone. I guess it’s something like stage fright, whatever you call it.
There’s also a work in the exhibition where the dancers were upside down. I did it to the extent I could. I couldn’t do a headstand, but I could manage a shoulder stand with the tree. And I thought, you know, that experience, if I hadn’t tried it, I would never have realized how much the dance was about gravity. So yeah, of course I had to do it, to really sense what we were doing.
AV: yeah, so you were in that video.
ZB: No, I wasn’t in the video, but I also try to do it upside down.
AV: Yeah, I guess I’m trying to grapple with the dryness and sterility of English, and how to describe that using the kind of bodily logic I’m trying to evoke.
ZB: Like I said, it even goes beyond that, right? I mean, I’m sure people have thought about this for millennia, the question of language and the body. But I don’t write anymore. You write, and you dance. I often feel language is a curse, at least for me.
This week I’m in New York, and I’ve been talking so much. But when I’m in New Caledonia, it’s different. There’s usually just one person to talk to, and maybe we speak an hour a day at most. The rest of the time, I’m not resorting to language. I’ve also been consciously trying to train myself to shut down the linguistic portion of my mind.
Because now, I don’t know your experience, but let’s say I see a flower, actually, during my plants period, I’d take people on walks. And often, when we’d see a plant, the first thing people would ask is: “What’s the name of the plant?” Without smelling it, without touching it, without dancing with it… the first impulse is to name it.
And I find that really limiting. But then again, here we are, talking, resorting to language. So how do you feel about that now? I imagine this is something you’re always thinking through.
AV: I think it’s a double-edged sword. Like in any medium, words can be limiting, but they can also crystallize into forms that open up other things. That’s why I’m so hesitant to read, because I have like, in a different context, where I feel less stage-frighty and it’s a more proper performance context, I would read this piece in a more possessed way. And that, to me, would actually live up to the fullest potential of what words can be, how they can bleed from the page.
But the page is actually so important. The more and more I do this possession practice, the more I realize: structure is important. Language is important. The page is important. Having something to hold on to, some kind of categories, even if they’re reductive, gives an illusion of safety. And from that safety, you can do something else. You can go on adventures. You can follow sexual desire. It can tame the anxiety a little bit. I think words do that. English does that for me in a lot of ways.
I feel like, growing up in Vietnam, it’s a very limiting, Confucian society. And yes, Vietnamese is a very poetic language, but it also carries all these associations with judgment and social order. And I find English, in comparison, so alleviating.
So I’ve come to this place where, as long as I can find the dance with the structure, as long as I can find the dance with the limits, I can be at that threshold: where something arrests me, and also where it opens something up for me.
I went through this phase, like four years, where I didn’t bring any theory into the studio. I didn’t write much, because I wanted to just be in the body. I really fetishized being in the body and its unruliness, that thing you can’t explain, that bodily logic. I still believe in that.
But now, having gone through that extreme, I’ve been able to find the more arousing part of language. Writing this has been so helpful. It crystallized for me a whole year of work, and then that opens up another thing.
I think that’s why theory is so important. If you don’t have certain moments of crystallization and detachment from the being-in-practice, then I feel like I would just keep doing the same thing.
ZB: Yeah, because, you know, I thought I was going to ask you about whether it’s writing, or more the performative, since we’re talking about performative. Richard writes about performative biology, and I immediately thought about the performative aspect of language, you know, like chanting, when you talk about structure, right?
But then I realized, I try to curb myself, I immediately go toward the New Age route. But what’s interesting to me is that you’re actually saying theory is important for you. Whereas normally people would assume chanting or some kind of spiritual or ritual language would be the key thing, right?
And I think maybe the other thing that came to mind was, sorry, this might sound a little lame, but this question of indigeneity. When you say you’re from Vietnam, and then you’re doing possession rituals in northern Vietnam, etc., there’s immediately this idea of returning to or reactivating some kind of indigenous practice. But it seems like that’s not what you’re doing. Yes, you’re referencing it, but you’re also writing texts, what’s the journal called again? The Dance…?
AV: The drama review? Yeah, TDR.
ZB: Richard also mentioned? Yeah. But anyway, so you’re actually doing TDR, you’re not doing chanting, yeah. But you’re saying, This is important to you.
AV: I think it’s important to you too. I mean, I do chant too in my work, I do and I feel like that with you too. Like, there’s all this Taoist philosophy, but you also are very much…
ZB: I mean, I don’t know how to put it yet, but I don’t you know. I kind of feel that, you know, why do we resist that stereotype. Why do we want to resist that stereotype?
AV: I mean, I think as a performer I can feel the fetishistic gaze. And I can hear it, like sometimes in post-performance talks, people ask about what actually goes down in the rituals. That immediately provokes my resistance. And maybe that’s also why I turn more into this academic thing, not to have to speak the truth of my work, but to speak their language a little bit more. But also, I’ve found comfort in returning to my roots in Vietnam and living out oral history, and turning to rituals.
It’s only been in the past two years that I’ve even said the word rituals so explicitly. I resisted it for so long, even though that’s my training, that’s performance studies, which is all about rituals. I realized that what I say to people and what I feel inside are actually quite distant.
Because I can talk about oral history, but I grew up during this weird transitional period in Vietnam, when capitalism was introduced, and then literacy became widespread. My grandparents were illiterate. It’s only from my parents’ generation that money became a thing, that literacy became a thing, and that rituals started eroding in favor of a more capitalist life.
So I felt like I really had experienced the traces of these oral ways of being, and realizing that I could talk about them, and people still wouldn’t get it. They wouldn’t be able to consume it. And that felt liberating. So now, I can kind of say these words, like rituals.
ZB: So my family is from Yunnan, which is not far from Vietnam, actually, right? At least you’ve been there, doing things for two years. I haven’t done anything where my family’s from, even though I work with plants. My cousins often say, “You’re working with plants, but you’re not doing anything in Yunnan?” It’s just crazy. But I think, you know, maybe I didn’t choose not to work in Yunnan, it just happened. I think it’s part of… whatever, the history of my life.
And also, as you mentioned, the history of Vietnam, the history of China. I left in the 1990s, and somehow now I’m in the so-called contemporary art world. And we are nomadic. I mean, I’m nomadic. I know you’re probably more rooted, but I’m nomadic. So, you know, I do something in a forest in Finland, and you do something in the lagoon in New Caledonia.
And perhaps I’m self-justifying, but I also often feel, I’m not returning to something. I’m sensing the energy of this particular forest, perhaps not so different from how humans sensed the energy of forests 2,000 years ago, 5,000 years ago, right? So I guess, either by choice or just by how things happened, I don’t fall into the ethnocentric path.
I am interested in sensing the land, sensing the forest, sensing the forces. But I don’t want to resort to, sorry, this will sound very politically incorrect, I don’t want to fall into the trap of saying… okay, so for example, you’re from Australia, so people who’ve lived there for 20,000 years, they do have the right to tell me what to do, okay.
But you, in Vietnam, you’re going back, right? You grew up in Vietnam, so you’re going back. But are you? Do you have this situation? I often feel that in China, it’s really difficult to even discuss these aspects of identity politics, right? Because it’s not, well, it hasn’t really been there.
Do you also sense this? Like when you say, “Okay, I’m not going back, I’m doing something, but I want to do this… and I also don’t want to do this,” right? So you’re so umbrella. I mean, do you also feel you can get people to join that discussion, where you’re not… like people don’t really care?
AV: by joining the discussion in Vietnam?
ZB: yeah, you know, in the dance community, art community, etc.
AV: That’s a big question. I mean, I don’t… I was just dancing with your thoughts, so I wasn’t really ruminating on the question for an answer. But my chain of association… I think the ambivalence definitely speaks to a lot of the sociopolitical situation in Vietnam, where I’ve always felt like I speak in riddles because I never know if there’s police in the crowd.
Oh my god, I’m having so many thoughts… something about this sensing body thing, which, to me, it’s so funny, Vietnam actually feels like quite a disembodied culture. And I don’t know, do you mean disembodied? Disembodied. And I’m not sure if it’s because of the actual culture, or if it’s just the 20th century of war and so much crazy history happening there.
I really feel like there’s no real capacity to just be there in a space and place and sense it, when I’m in Vietnam. There’s not much of a culture of that, at least not in the city, not in Hanoi, where I grew up. I think there’s just so much… looking back, there’s so much of this sort of mania to develop, to get over poverty, to get over war. And everyone’s just working, working, working, working.
And I think that’s also in the countryside too, so it’s not just a city thing.
So I actually feel like I had to be here to do that kind of sensing work.
I don’t know how to respond to your identity politics question. That feels like another can of worms.
ZB: But I mean, just, sorry to be specific, and do you know, let’s say artists were dancers, let’s say if they read in Vietnam, if they read your text, how not to write it? How now to write like a white man? Does it matter there?
AV: That’s a good question. I mean, I feel like this kind of decolonial thought is not yet a thing in Vietnam. Like, of course, some people read it and take it up, but from my judgment, as a field, I don’t think people there care too much. Because I think there’s so much aspiration to the West. There’s so much, like, trying to be white in this abstract way.
I turn back to Ho Chi Minh and this sort of, this thing that got drilled into my headm this idea that “we’re going to be standing shoulder to shoulder with the powers of the five continents,” like this desire to be up there among the colonizers, basically.
So that’s a real frustration: not being able to do that kind of work there, because over there, it feels like they want to be that, if that makes sense. Yeah.
ZB: I think, you know, just a random question, right? I think your writing is so much about decolonial thought, yes? And I did this project, you know the image I showed of the men in Taiwan having sexual intimacy, sexual relationships with ferns in Taiwan? Yeah. And I did it without even realizing why I wanted to do it. But later I realized, it’s because ferns were kind of colonial victims, in a sense.
Even though ferns are everywhere, I’m sure also in Vietnam, right? They’re everywhere, even in cities, they don’t appear in cultural representations.
Taiwan was colonized by Japan in the mid-19th century. Japanese artists went to Taiwan, and they immediately paid attention to tropical flowers. That’s probably what we humans are intuitively attracted to. Then, when the Nationalists went to Taiwan in the mid-20th century, the airline logo became a plum flower, that’s because the head of the Nationalist government, Chiang Kai-shek, loved plum flowers. He planted a lot of plum trees, so the plum flower became a national symbol. It’s on the currency. But nobody loved ferns, not the colonialists, not the Nationalists.
But then I go to an Indigenous festival, and people are wearing ferns, actual fern leaves, as part of their ceremonial costume. They eat the plant, too. Then I realized: doing the project was actually not just about sex or intimacy. There’s also a kind of decolonial aspect to it. People talk about eco-queer themes, too, but this was something different, and hard to explain. It takes me a while to explain it.
So, I mean, you think clearly about decolonial issues, especially in language, right? But now you’re also thinking about culture, the body, rituals, and more. So I’m wondering… what comes up for you?
AV: Yeah, when you say that, oh gosh, I keep thinking back to the title How Not to Dance Like a Human, which is such an over-promise. But it does feel necessarily ambitious. Hearing all this, like the colonial imposition of plums, I’m like, oh, that is the human project. You get caught in your own fetish: your fetish of what’s beautiful, your fetish of what needs to happen. This thing of, “I will be the savior. I caused the climate crisis, but I too will bring the solution.”
Like, you just can’t get out of your own fetish of how the world should be.
I guess I’ve been trying to turn toward this lineage, like Qigong, but also experimental dance from downtown New York, where people are really trying to figure out how to just be bodies. Like, how can bodies be bodies, and not become erected into this “human” thing that then acts out all these fantasies that have led us to where we are today?
When I hear the word “decolonial,” I squirm a little bit. I mean, yeah, it’s a helpful frame of reference to know where I am politically, maybe. But it also sounds too much like an assertion: this is the work I do, this is my intervention in the world. And I don’t see you working in that way either.
I get curious about these other marginal ways of life, the ones that get pushed out, or banished into the realm of noise. And I just follow that. To me, it’s a very sexual process. Like Freud says, it’s a very infantile, sexual thing. I just follow what my body is curious about.
But also, there needs to be work to explore why I’m curious about something. Is it a sedimentation of generations of colonization? And for me, that’s where decolonial thought comes in.
So I’m constantly toggling between this, quote-unquote, “primitive logic of the body”, you follow curiosity, one thing leads to another, and this more theoretical framework: queer theory, decolonial thought, feminist theory… These help me tease out why I feel the way I do. What’s the historical sedimentation behind that sense? Why am I drawn to that?
Because I do think in art, there’s a real fetish for the raw impulse. But I’m like, what if that raw impulse is racist? Like, what if it’s the consequence of centuries of racism, and that’s why you’re drawn to that thing?
Like, I love seeing ballet lines, you know? But it’s quite fascistic. And I’m okay with that. I’m okay with sitting with that perverse pleasure, too. That gets a little too big, but…
ZB: I think we stop. You know, my video work, I always just cut. You know, there’s no reason to cut, but that’s, that’s the end.
Okay? (laughs) thank you. There’s never real reason.
AV: It’s hard to ask questions. Yeah… Any questions.
Audience (Richard): Bo, you have a slide up at the end. Here it starts, and it’s a bit of a provocation, but also interesting. And you know, one of the things that I have enjoyed about “taking bird seriously” is sort of related to this. This question, right? Once you de center the human, you automatically decenter whiteness, maleness, Anglo, European as sort of the locus of the discipline. So this broader view, especially bringing nature into your practice, that adds that element, you know, inspires this kind of inquiry, this question you have here.
ZB: No, you want to say, No, this is not me. This is based on your work.
I like what you said, you’re really just working to be bodies, not humans. You know, one thing I do to help myself is just say, “They’re just a bunch of monkeys.” You know, I’m a monkey, you’re a monkey, we’re just a bunch of monkeys sitting here. And we’re just a bunch of monkeys… trying things, right?
But then I was thinking, you were talking about, do you feel American? You are American, right? There’s a lot of real politics going on here. You live in this country.
Anyway, I feel like you said, not white, not straight, not a man, etc., so now we go to, we’re just human. But then it starts to feel like a 19th-century situation, where political movements were all about saying, we are human, therefore we deserve rights. Right? So now we’re kind of turning away from that.
I’m not a political theorist, but I kind of sense that if a political theorist were listening, they would immediately pick up on this: How not to dance like a human, how not to live as a human… but also, how not to become a victim to what happened in the 18th or 19th century, politically speaking. That’s the tension. That’s the thing we’ve been struggling with all along.
In a way, yes, we are artists. You’re right. But we’re working with different sensibilities. And I think, for sure, there needs to be a different vocabulary, a different political theory.
I tried to bring this question up by saying, “Fish also do politics.” But there’s no language for the politics of the lagoon. Whatever we have, democracy, authoritarianism, these terms clearly don’t fit the lagoon situation.
And I’m sure that also applies to our situation. Sorry— it’s very jumbled.
AV: I could respond. I mean, I think it’s a complicated question. I don’t even know.
I could make the same argument, too, about bodies, that if you center bodily logic, then categories kind of become secondary. Because you’re just matter and flesh, and you follow senses.
But then, yeah, I’m thinking about someone like Mel Y. Chen, who’s a queer theorist studying how chemicals are racialized. And it’s so hard to pinpoint, but I do think there is a way that matter matters, to race, to gender, that these regimes of meaning-making and categorization are performative; they produce a reality that has to be grappled with.
To me, the utopian kind of yearning for this alternative world— one centered on the non-human, on bodily logic, that could somehow get rid of this arrogance of the individual subject, has to happen at the same time as the grappling with the historical consequences of these regimes. All these “-isms” that we still live out and reproduce every day.
ZB: Yeah, I just say this, and then we can stop. I think it is a very bodily question, like, what you were trying to do? I’m sure, yeah.
AV: I mean, I remember, oh my god, I did this dance with this woman, Moriah Evans, and it was so intense, like we actually were Q and A-ing each other about our flesh, and how our flesh is raised and is gendered. It’s so fantastical, I can’t even reproduce it. But yeah, it’s this really bodily thing, and so speculative, but it’s so real, like when you sense it, you sense it. Like race produces bodily compartments like it’s but when I say it, I can sound a little cookoo…
ZB: We stop.
