Body, Society, History: Enacting materialisms through performances

My dissertation takes contemporary artistic encounters as the locus for examining philosophy of immanence. It takes artistic and performance works as a kind of thinking in itself, which affords concrete ways to approach how language, emergence, duration and interpersonal relations can be situated in a philosophy of immanence. The dissertation is situated in a transcultural context, with artistic works and theoretical framework from both non-West and Western perspectives are brought into fruitful interlocution. The first part of the dissertation on language and immanence looks at language as paradoxical, beyond the reductionist frame of form and content; it inquires further into language as unseparated, or less separated, from the unification of form and being, in the case of onomatopoeia. It draws on Deleuze and Guattari, Massumi, Zen Buddhist and Chinese theory of language, with a close reading of Lawrence Abu Hamdan’s “Contra Diction: Speech against Itself” as well as Hong Kongnese director Danny Yung’s theater works that expand the traditional training method of Peking opera. The second part deals with the significance of randomness that emerges from an unarticulated state and how this novelty may help the perceiver understand the immanent ground, which allows for emergence to happen. It draws on Whitehead, Parisi and Neo-Confucian thinkers with artistic examples of Ralf Baecker’s “Mirage” (featuring a computer that “sleeps”) among other media art works. The third part examines relations between man and machine through the shared site of the post-gender notion of “abstract sex” (Parisi) and what can be tentatively called “Confucian feminism” (Li-Hsiang Lisa Rosenlee). This part analyzes Korean choreographer Geumhyung Jeong’s performance works involving her body and machine bodies. The fourth part examines the constructed notion of time and progress through the performance “Ten Thousand Tigers” by Ho Tzu Nyen, which recounts the history of Southeast Asia with tiger as figuration. PHD in History of Art Completed: 18. Februar 2019 First published: e-Publications@khm