Zhuanxu Xu

   Filmography
   The Lunar Month
   One Narrow and Flimsy Grasp
   Photography
   Sojourners of Singing        
   Fleeting Shadows Lingering Whispers
   If the Night Could Testify
   Intimacy and Mutable Contingency
   Choreographies of Vertebrae
   Performance
   Caring Labour and the Oppression within the Household
   Soft Choke of the Clock
   Fashion
   .08zine 2020 Volume 1 Lookbook
   Huidi Zhan A/W19
   
   Prints
   Academic Translation
   Info

PERFORMANCE
Soft Choke of the Clock, 2018
In Soft Choke of the Clock, I use my own body as a site of tension to examine the invisible yet deeply felt conditions of feminised labour, the limits of institutional critique, and the alienation of work inherent in capitalist systems. The repetitive motions and physical endurance required to sustain the crawling is the cyclical drudgery of work — particularly the undervalued and underseen labour often associated with feminine roles. Knees bear bruises, postures contort, and exhaustion surfaces. This gimp-masked or semi-clad figure is both sexualised and vulnerable, fetishised and fragmented.

Central to this performance is the relationality of the body: the interplay between physical form, the space it occupies, and the gaze of onlookers. The mask and partial anonymity serve to blur the boundaries of individuality, suggesting how labouring bodies — especially those socially coded as feminine — are frequently objectified or made interchangeable under capitalist logic. By enduring these gestures repeatedly, the performance highlights how institutional critique itself can become entrapped by the very systems it seeks to challenge. The body’s exhaustion, depicted through knees bearing marks and the contortions of posture, reflects how capitalism enforces a persistent performance of productivity. In Soft Choke of the Clock, alienation is made manifest: the performer’s body appears both hyper-visible in its exposed state and strangely dehumanised, reduced to a mere tool or spectacle.

Soft Choke of the Clock does not posit liberation as telos but instead probes the precarity of resistance itself. The performance’s exhaustion-laden duration ruptures the illusion of efficiency, forcing confrontation with the embodied costs of labor. Though critique risks assimilation into the systems it challenges, the work insists on the fugitive potency of refusal: a transient yet incisive disruption of the temporal and ideological architectures that govern our bodies. It is a testament to the chokehold of routine, and the fraught possibility of gasping beyond it.