小青龍湯
Little Dragon Soup
2019
Scripture, Herbal Medicine, Speakers, Experimental Music Original version
Dimensions variable

The dragon submerges into turbulent waves to ease troubled waters. The dragon as cinnamon twigs, as ephedra, as peony root, as dried ginger, as asarum, schizandra, penillia and a dash of honey-fried licorice. An aromatic recipe that is at the same time mythological, medicinal, and revealing of a cosmological order, and in this world, a performative score is vivid, ambiguous yet tangible, constantly changing, guided by a calculation of botanical powers, a dynamic design to restore estranged morality, to qualm an emotional flooding in the lungs, to shudder the sorrow that sprouts in stagnated waters, to keep dexterity and flow and mobility of life.

A view of the body, in which forms are implicitly inferred to by relationships, resonates with a specific kind of expanded listening first introduced to me by a Chinese medicine shop owner, who offers poetry as his preferred form of remedy after intuited reading of one’s emotional and physical body. A key term here is wen (聞), a rather open sensory concept that is fundamental in traditional clinical practices—to smell, to hear, to intuit, to catch wind of. Little dragon soup is an exercise of abstract scoring, sound, and kinetics that speak to the body as a micro-universe.