the Piper

performance with installation

The project focuses on how this embodied medical knowledge entered Europe through colonial mediation. A Dutch missionary affiliated with the VOC documented the use of moxibustion after witnessing an enslaved woman being treated for epilepsy. So that moxibustion was reframed through Western anatomical language, extracted from its cultural context and repositioned within European systems of classification and authority. It reveals how knowledge is shaped by power: who observes, who records, who translates, and who is rendered silent.

The work explores the embodied language as the new form of knowledge and site of resistance towards translation within colonial power, staying drifting and opaque. The installation brings together a series of copperplate engravings, and performative glass masks. Copperplate engraving—historically used to disseminate anatomical images—appears here as a contested visual language. Rather than presenting the body as stable and knowable, the engravings fragment and drift, replacing authoritative anatomy with uncertainty and rupture. The glass masks, inspired by epileptic bodily states, extend this inquiry into embodied language: the body becomes a site where meaning flickers, breaks down, and resists translation.

photos by Yufei Gao