#laiwan

Laiwan (born 1961) is a Zimbabwean interdisciplinary artist, art critic, gallerist, writer, curator and educator. Her wide-ranging practice is based in poetics and philosophy. She lives in Vancouver, British Columbia Canada. Via Wikipedia https://www.laiwanette.net/longer-bio

[I love my shape. I didn't always. A few years ago, my massage therapist advised: "Stand naked in the mirror and say, "I love you." A colleague and I laughed about this afterward, but I persisted with this through a series of health-building efforts toward increased somatic intelligence. It worked. The massage therapist recently told me, "I could work on you all day; you know how to receive, and not everyone knows how to receive." I was pleased with this diagnosis. Released from the baggage of apartheid, my cells and muscles are open and light. These are also aspirations of both traditional Chinese medicine and Buddhism. Bruce Lee believed that in order to be a good fighter in martial arts, you must have loose hips. For this he practiced the dance of the cha-cha. Loose hips and a swagger can propel a generosity and a lightness that is infectious— it can become viral. A femme can swagger much the same way a butch can swagger, but every swagger has a different tenor, a different musicality, and this is rooted in chemistry, cellular memory, and cellular exchange via touch, fluids, sound, taste, sight, intuition, instinct, guts, breath, etc. All expand bodily intelligence, physical and emotional attention, and consciousness. To balance yin and yang, I work with somatic intelligence performatively; that is, I perform with intentional, conscious ways of moving in the world. Like an actor, I can choose which pose, which posture to embody, to appropriate at any given moment. At a young age, I saw Clint Eastwood in A Fistful of Dollars, and I wanted to wear a blanket in the desert, ride alone on a horse, eat beans from a tin plate. Luckily I didn't get trapped there. My imagination was demanding and rigorous and, instead, I propelled myself into this soulful trajectory, embodying hunger and desire with a fistful of bliss.