Where the world accelerates, she slows us down—with intention, with breath.
In Soft Acts of Resistance, interdisciplinary artist Siyuan Meng presents a trilogy of works that cross screendance, photography, and live performance—each tracing the sensing body as a site of ritual, perception, and quiet transformation. Through minimalist gesture, elemental material, and the aesthetics of slowness, Meng builds poetic spaces that resist spectacle and invite presence.
The trilogy—Porous, Body Trip, and Balcony Whispers—unfolds across mediums yet remains rooted in a single artistic inquiry: what does it mean to dwell in the body, softly, in a time of structural acceleration?
In Porous, performed on a drifting canal boat beneath the glass towers of East London, the performer moves within a skeletal shelter made of branches and gauze. Her gestures—leaning, folding, breathing—become a soft interruption to the hardness of the urban landscape. The performance is less choreography than attunement: to water, to wind, to the silent nearness of strangers. Porosity becomes a political stance—a willingness to remain open in systems designed to harden us.
Body Trip, a screendance film, traverses interior and planetary landscapes. The camera follows the figure through rituals of repetition, walking, and emotional resonance. Here, embodiment is not a fixed state but a fluid field of memory and return. Drawing from Daoist non-duality and diasporic experience, the work moves beyond narrative into cycles of becoming.
Balcony Whispers, the final and most intimate piece, is a photographic meditation on the feminine body in stillness. Set in the liminal space of a balcony, a solitary figure—clothed in lace and shadow—engages in micro-rituals of rest and attention. The images capture not performance, but listening. In this held space, stillness is not passive—it breathes.
Across all three works, Meng proposes slowness as resistance. These are not spectacles to consume but spaces to feel through. In a world oversaturated with image and urgency, Soft Acts of Resistance reminds us of the radical potential of pause, breath, and embodied care.
