Introduction

Dressed in matching camo pants, t-shirt and cap, Chun Hua Catherine Dong’s face is entirely covered in deer hide she has painstakingly glued onto her face prior to the performance. Over the course of 2.5 hours, the China-born and Tiohtiá:ke/Montréal-based artist sits atop a bright yellow scaffolding, towering over the audience of the Harold J. Miossi Art Gallery, in San Luis Obispo, California in 2017. An assistant slowly pushes the scaffold­ing around the space as the performance unfolds. Dong imperceptibly moves as she travels across space in yoga poses: slouching over the edge of the scaf­fold­ing, lying on her side and on her back, holding the tree, the corpse, and the easy yoga poses. Already viewed as a meditative practice, the yoga poses are deliberately performed in the slowest way possible, as if to make way for the expansive and generous temporality of self-care. The slowness of her movement can also be attributed to her being completely deprived of sight. Conscientious of not falling over the edge, or making any rushed movements, Dong embraces the almost forced meditative state in which she finds herself.

At one point during the slow-paced performance, the assistant strategically positions the scaffolding right underneath the skylight. There, the artist takes on the yoga posture of The Warrior I, as hinted by the title of the perfor­mance: both her hands are enjoined over her head, stretched toward the sky, all the weight of her body rests on her left leg, while her right leg is in ex­tension. Her shadow is disproportionately projected onto the bare white walls of the gallery, multiplying and monumentalizing her gesture. A foundational pose of yoga āsana, the Warrior I symbolizes power and strength (Sarbacker 2021, 195). According to Yoga Basics, an educational yoga website, the one who adopts any of the Warrior poses (there are five variations) embodies “the auspicious and heroic energy of a warrior” (Yoga Basics). Additionally, War­rior I is said to be conducive to overcoming life’s challenges (Yoga Basics). While this is meant to be experienced by the one performing the pose, witness­ing it invites a slow, meditative introspection on the part of the viewers too.

Adopting the Warrior I pose can also be read as a caring and reparative act. In the article “The Body as Infrastructure,” authors Luis Andueza et al. argue that the human body can be perceived as an ongoingly reconfigured lively infrastructure. They ask “how we might ensure the love, care and repair that is necessary to sustain our fleshy forms when confronted with the vio­lence of capitalist abstraction” (Andueza et al. 2021, 800) so tightly enmeshed with the logic of imposed resilience, I might add. In indulging in acts of self-care—through positive, reparative, and sustainable gestures and actions—Dong offers to the viewers a critical strategy to transfigure inescapable vio­lence. As a voyage into the inner self, yoga is all about making peace with one’s body and mind, which can, in turn, allow one to mediate troubling sit­uations with more clarity. To care for others, we need to care for ourselves. That is the argument put forward by the artist when she comments: “I care about myself because I matter, if I matter, we matter, we are transforming what matters.” What Dong suggests is a reverberating expansion of care in concentric circles (outwards from the self), as a strategy for self-resilience.

In introducing The Warrior performance, the organizers of the Inverse Per­formance Art Festival comment on how Dong “is interested in grappling with ways of using and enacting self-care as an act of resilience. She seeks to relate sustainable gestures or actions that can transform balance without inhibiting balance itself” (Inverse). Not only does this strategy help come to grasp with external violence, but it also offers a way of transforming such violence, with­out engaging with it directly; that is, without representing or depicting it. International relations scholars Brad Evans and Julian Reid speak to a deep sense of powerlessness associated with imposed resilience on neoliberal sub­jects when writing that: “To be resilient, the subject must disavow any belief in the possibility to secure itself from the insecure sediment of existence, accept­ing instead an understanding of life as a permanent process of con­tinual adaptation to threats and dangers which appear outside its control” (Evans and Reid 2014, 68). The artist’s body becomes a site of subversion and satire where violence is appropriated, transfigured, and processed (Dong). It is in this sense of transformation that self-care appears as a feminist strategy of radical resilience and of adaptation to troubling externalities. Chosen resili­ence anchored in care, as put forward by Dong, stands as an empowering stance rather than a constricting one.