Short Performance Videos

Jingwei Bu performs in response to life events that are recorded with one fixed shot and natural or simple lighting resource. This particular shooting set-up is Bu’s experiment on a meditated way of presenting live performance with video documentation. This approach enables the viewing experience as much similar as viewing live performance. Either assisted by people around for a spontaneous performing or shot by professional videographer for a planned performance, Bu perform for urgent expression of personal life experience and happenings in the world as society. Bu explores video as a new material to extend the philosophical questioning of life journey. 

Performer: Jingwei Bu

Video bragger: Ying He

人/Rén/People (2020)

The ‘人/Ren/People‘ is first made during the beginning of Covid-19 pandemic, then reshoot with professional assistance. It’s one of three videos Jingwei made for experimenting on a mediated way of presenting live performance with video documentation. This is achieved by one fixed lens for shooting and zero editing. This approach enables the viewing experience as much similar as viewing live performance. Either assisted by people around for a spontaneous performing or shot by professional videographer for a planned performance, Bu perform for urgent expression of personal life experience and happenings in the world as society.

Words Reader (2021)

In Words Reader (2021), Bu translates English words into her first language, Mandarin. The English terms were found in academic texts about art. Through the act of translation, Bu draws our attention to specialised language, and how it can exclude people from accessing certain knowledge. She raises questions about the fluidity of meaning and if the words fully translate across different languages and cultures. Charlemagne is quoted as saying that: ‘To have another language is to possess a second soul’. In Word Reader, Bu’s souls seem to be dislocated, each with a different way of thinking about the world. Bu’s work reflects her own navigation of language as a Chinese migrant living in Australia. Although she speaks several languages, she expresses her frustration in not feeling fluent in them. Living in foreign countries for almost twenty years, she has a sense of disconnection from her mother tongue. Bu’s visual language then becomes a vital form of expression and a way for her to connect deeply with her inner self and others.

Taking Turns (2021)

Taking Turns (2021) is a video installation with everyday object and live performance. Jingwei performed a predesigned code for the video, then performed a different score live as the video is playing in front of the audience with three paper plinths presenting the objects in glass dome. The drawing of a hand on the top sheet of paper indicates the holding action in the video. These three objects with the three primary colours are a thumbnail, a fresh mandarin, a milk bottle lid. The artist will perform seating among the audiences, making notes of the sequence of the three objects taking turns to be presented in the video. The note is made on the same paper sheet as the paper plinth which are A4 copy paper. The performance is finished when the artist arises and pin down the paper on the wall after the video is played one loop. 

Tracing Memories (2021)

For Jingwei, the body is both material and vocabulary: a medium for expressing and generating meaning. Tracing Memory consists of two short performance videos and forms part of a broader material investigation into red cabbage, a subject she explored intensively over six months in 2021 to unpack cultural identity and childhood memory. In one video, a hand moves through the air, drawing invisible curved lines that mimic the layered forms of a halved cabbage. In the other, a brush traces those same flowing lines in ink on rice paper, guided by close observation of the cabbage's interior. Together, these gestures, ephemeral and permanent, resonate with the movement of calligraphy and reflect Jingwei’s diasporic longing and her ongoing search for a renewed cultural identity.