Yiming Clara: 似曾相识 | Dance, in Theater with Window @ Slash

Opening Reception: Saturday, May 2 | 5 to 8pm
Artist remarks at 4:30pm

An installation by Yiming Clara in /room/, juried by Nicolás Colón and Fernanda Partida Ochoa.

Though easily translated as “déjà vu,” 似曾相识 is a Chinese idiomatic phrase whose literal translation leans closer to “it is as if we have known each other before,” suggesting two subjects and their potential relationality. Yet a precise ambiguity suffuses the phrase as it holds both conditions simultaneously: the feeling directed towards a situation or place, and that towards another person.

Yiming Clara is interested in how opening up the exactingness of things allows us to renegotiate our relations to the world and to others. The exhibition’s dual titles do not translate one another but rather move in parallel, inviting us to notice how the meaning of things become mutable depending on what they sit beside. In the installation, familiar forms—theatre chairs, a shoe rack, scenes in a film—are constructed and arranged so that their functions are reorientated to create new situations that recalibrate the relationships between the viewer, object, and space. Objects dwell on the verge of recognition, where meaning surfaces only through the encounter with viewers and in the form of a question.

似曾相识 | Dance, in Theater with Window explores the exhibition space as a site of social choreography, where the ways we are made to move, see, and be seen shape the way things come to appear as art. For the artist, the exhibition title points to the dance that surfaces, a performance we don’t see but instead step into, asking: What are you moved by? Or actually, what is moving you?

Yiming Clara is an artist raised in Beijing, living and working in Berkeley. She is interested in the language in things beyond words, and the things that can’t fit squarely within language. With an interest in how we move about in the world between those surfaces of material and of social construction, her work takes impressions of the familiar as medium and constructs situations that open onto new potential worlds.