Bloody Ink Play

Bloody Ink Play is an ongoing performance project by Jingwei Bu, initiated in 2021. This work delves into the body as both an instrument and a medium, as well as a site for exploration. Through this project, Jingwei investigates the intertwining of life experiences with the daily practice of cultivating an awareness of existence.

Bloody Ink Play (3rd Development)

This iteration explores the continuous flow and cycle of existence: birth, trauma, death. The durational performance not only represents a ritual but becomes one. Through sound, movement, light, and audible breath the artist-body is both the material, the timepiece, and the subject of the work. Life itself is finite, but the cycle of life is infinite. 

Collaborators: Jarrad Payne (sound), Emilly Tulloch (Sound), Sanaz Dollard ( costume)

Venue: Waterside Workers Hall, Hall Floor,Vitalstatistix, Adelaide

Adelaide Festival Centre inSPACE Development showing, 2024. Image by Ailing

Bloody Ink Play (The second development)

This iteration is part of Adelaide Festival Centre InSPACE Development program from 29 April to 9 May,2024.

Collaborators:

Emilly Tulloch (Sound and music), Jarrad Pynge (Sound), Felicity Boyd (movement), Maryam Rahmani (music), Jazmine Deng (Bell)

Venue: Adelaide Festival Centre Drama Center Rehearsal Room

Bloody Ink Play (Work in process showing) at Performance Space, Sydney, 2022. Documentation video excerpt. Photo by: Prudence Upton

Bloody Ink Play (1st Development)

This iteration is a personal reflection on the act of giving birth, based on the artist’s own experience of two life-threatening deliveries. According to Buddhist philosophy, individuals go through several cycles of birth, living, death and rebirth. Employing modalities of performance (through tai chi-inspired movement) and installation, the performance uses a roll of calico, sheets of paper, a clothes rack and a pot of inky water as props which act as metaphors representing blood and the passage of time.

Jingwei performs a series of cyclical movements assisted by two performers that include passing a stone, the weight of a newborn baby, between the three of them, balancing on one foot in a pot of inky water for a precise length of time, before trailing the ink marks on paper, and balancing prostate on a small platform.

In Jingwei’s performance, the visceral and expulsive experience of birthing is transformed into careful and repetitive movement, exploring endurance, resilience, the communal care required for mothering and an acceptance of risk and suffering as a natural part of living.

Blood Ink Play is as part of TIDAL, curated by Louana Sainsbury as part of LiveWorks Festival for Performance Space, Carriageworks, Sydney, 26 October 2022

15 minutes performance.
Assistant performers: Cinzia Cremona, Grace Hu
Music: Blindfold by Zephyr Quartet

Venue: Performance Space, Sydney