3 Bowls

Performance for the opening of Future Art Festival : ‘Remote Sensing Future Living’

Gengdan Institute of Beijing University of Technology. China

2025

The performance begins with a single silver orb resting in the space. It appears seamless, closed, almost remote—an object without an inside. Slowly, the artist opens it. The orb separates into three identical metal bowls. Hidden within them is rice. What first looked like a future artifact becomes a set of ordinary vessels and a handful of grain.

The artist pours the rice from one bowl to another. The action is quiet and deliberate. Metal meets metal; grain shifts and settles. The pouring follows the weight of the rice, the tilt of the bowl, the resistance of the hand. The artist does not command the materials so much as listen to them. The bowls contain, the rice circulates, and the body moves within this exchange.

In the final action, the artist’s body replaces the rice inside the bowl. The artist folds into the vessel’s space—hand, head, curled form—becoming the substance the bowl holds. The metal reflects the body. The body becomes material, measure, offering. The performance ends in stillness: three bowls, a trace of rice, a human presence held inside a domestic object.

A quiet ritual of containment and exchange, 3 Bowls treats rice as sustenance, memory, and cultural weight, and the body as something that can be poured, held, and sensed. Made for an exhibition themed Remote Sensing, it imagines the present as a stratum for future discovery—not through data alone, but through gesture, presence, and the weight of stillness.