藍天瑀
I am blue like the expanse of the sky, splicing the heavens, delineating the infinities that bound our material world
天
I am blue like the gleam of the stones, where we find the meatspace and long for the perversion of corporeal reality
瑀
The landscapes of the human skin is blue
The materiality of the flesh is blue
The transfiguration of the Real is blue
The ode to the Eternal Forms is blue
The infinite tends to the singular
The singularity tends to infinity
The weave and its asymptotic slink is blue
Dilation of the interlaced net, of the deep black pinhole of perception
Contraction of gridlined plane, of the murky darkness of yonic wavelengths
Blue consumes its tail.
Email Lamceline.ty@gmail.com
䷂屯: A self-taught traditional Chinese seal carver, DJ and tattoo practitioner with performance and writing forming the core of their work, Blue is concerned with returning to ancestral roots and cosmologies. Blue hopes to learn to care and heal through practice and honour traditions, past(s) and histories.
Education
(2021 - 2024)
Goldsmiths, University of London
BA (Hons) Fine Art and History of Art
First Class Honours
London, United Kingdom
(2019 - 2020)
Nanyang Technological University School of Art, Design and Media
BFA Media Art with Specialisation in Photography and Minor in Art History
Incomplete
Singapore, Singapore
Exhibitions
(13 - 17 June 2024)
Goldsmiths, University of London Undergraduate Fine Art Degree Show
Ben Pimlott Building, Level 3, Goldsmiths, University of London
London, United Kingdom
(9 - 10 May 2024)
Liminal Entities
Milbank Podium
Performance in collaboration with Nereus Hall
Supported by UAL’s Bounce Fund
London, United Kingdom
(8 June 2023)
Kunst Affair Vol. 2
AMP Studios
London, United Kingdom
(6 - 27 August 2022)
Thresholds of Being
starch
Curated by Sheryl Gwee, Xuan Yeo
Singapore, Singapore
Artist Panels and Talks
(14 August 2024)
EXTRACORPOREALITY: BODIES AND THE URGE TO TRANSCEND
Pushkin House
Artist talk and panel regarding critial theory and art practice
Hosted by everyoneisagirl, discussion led by Noa Fischer, curated by Ester Freider
London, United Kingdom
Writing and Publications
(January 2025)
“玄之又玄,众妙之门。(Xuan and again xuan, gate to all mysteries.)” : Daoist Philosophy and Cosmotechnics as Gateway to Reconciling our Relationship to The Cyberspace
Edited Dissertation
Published by Xeno-Futurism
London, United Kingdom
(2024)
“玄之又玄,众妙之门。(Xuan and again xuan, gate to all mysteries.)” : Daoist Philosophy and Cosmotechnics as Gateway to Reconciling our Relationship to The Cyberspace
BA Dissertation
Distinction
Supervised by Dr. Alice Andrews
Goldsmiths, University of London
London, United Kingdom
(August 2024)
Lest it disappear from the world: The Scars of Singaporean Performance Art History and the Choreopolitical Rise of Singaporean Movement Art and Butoh in the 2020s
Visual Cultures/ Art History Essay and Research Project
Distinction
Goldsmiths, University of London
London, United Kingdom
(June 2024)
spaces as traces: A Devotion to Narratives between the Thresholds of Spirituality and Digitality
Review written for Shiyun Teo First Solo Exhibition, spaces as traces at Feelium Gallery, 14 - 17 June 2024
London, United Kingdom
Performances
(19 - 20 August 2023)
Livia Rita: Dystopian Wetlands
Southbank Centre
With Avantgardeners Community
Creature/ Movement Artist
London, United Kingdom
DJ
(21 August 2024)
FREE 4 ALL
0116internetculture X Bakunawa Entertainment
Four Quarters Peckham
London, United Kingdom
(15 August 2024)
Margins Pop-Ups
Eastern Margins
The Steam Room
London, United Kingdom
(31 May 2024)
OPIA MYSPACE
Opia
Unit58
London, United Kingdom
(27 April 2024)
K2Y.mp3
Undisclosed Location
London, United Kingdom
(31 March 2024)
K2Y.mp3
Protocol, Vauxhall Arches
London, United Kingdom
(22 March 2024)
CLUBPOC
The Yard Theatre
London, United Kingdom
Tattoo
(March - April 2023)
Artist
Casa Chisme
London, United Kingdom
(10 - 11 December 2022)
barang shop!!!
Studio Lotusroot
London, United Kingdom
2024
(Edited verison to be published by Xeno-Futurism in January 2025)
Supervised by Dr. Alice Andrews
Goldsmiths, University of London
Their love is felt – passed down from generations down, even before my existence on this material plane.
飲水思源
Yin shui si yuan
Chinese proverb,
“When you drink water, think of the source.”
Preview
1.1. Daoist Philosophy, Internet Technology, Cyberfeminism and Cosmotechnics: Narrow Approaches to Human-Cyberspace Relationships
In the binary digits, the basis of computer language, technology and command executions, exist the traces of Taoist knowledge and celestial mathematics. [3]
The genesis of this project was a deep fascination towards how Daoist philosophy is foundational to and inherently encoded into the technology that gives rise to the internet and cyberspace. This will be on the basis that the conception of binary code used in computing was influenced by the I Ching (易經) or Book of Changes, an ancient Chinese text that elucidates concepts central to Daoist philosophy. [4] Through Yuk Hui’s Art and Cosmotechnics [5], I hope to employ a focused discussion on aesthetics through Daoist logic in Shanshui (山水) painting [6] [7] as a Cosmotechnical methodology which can remedy conventionally racist and exclusionary Cyberfeminist thought and writing.
I also have observed that Cyberfeminist activism has shortcomings that lie in “educated, white, upper-middle-class, English-speaking, culturally sophisticated readership,” [8] ironically echoing the “damaging universalism” of previous Feminist movements [9], which runs counter to its purported liberatory qualities. [10]
Figure 1. Entry 1 – 28. Cyberfeminism Index, 2023. [Screenshot author’s own]. Accessed July 5, 2024. https://cyberfeminismindex.com/.
Concurrently, the resurgence in popularity of Cyberfeminism in the 2020s has meant that the decades-long lineage of utopian theories at the “intersection of computer technology and subversive feminist counterculture” [11] has become very relevant in discussions of this technological age. Its beginnings can be traced back to Donna Haraway’s 1985 seminal text, A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century, and is the first entry in Mindy Seu’s Cyberfeminism Index. [12] (Figure 1.)
Both Hui’s work and Cyberfeminism have inspired a central motive for this project – to utilise this strategy for expanding approaches to relationships between humans and cyberspace, with Cosmotechnics as a conceptual tool play in reconciling such human-cyberspace relationships, and to explore how Daoist philosophy through aesthetics solves the limitations of Cyberfeminism’s utopic visions of our relationship with cyberspace. Thus, could Daoism present a solution to expand narrow approaches to human-cyberspace relationships?
[3] Eng, Alvin Hui Lim, Digital Spirits in Religion and Media: Possession and Performance (2018), 160.
[4] Eng, Digital Spirits in Religion and Media: Possession and Performance, 160.
[5] Hui, Art and Cosmotechnics.
[6] Shanshui (山水) painting, or Shanshuihua (山水畫) translates to “paintings of mountains and rivers”. Shanshui (山水) is a genre of Chinese monumental landscape painting that developed during the Wei, Tsin and Six Dynasties eras (220-589) and the Five Dynasties period (907-60).
Fong, Wen C., Beyond Representation: Chinese Painting and Calligraphy, Eighth–Fourteenth Century (New York, New Haven and London: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Yale University Press, 1992). https://cdn.sanity.io/files/cctd4ker/production/22adb7b9e723c11398839fecda4e5d584b04305e.pdf.
[7] Hui, Art and Cosmotechnics.
[8] Fernandez, Maria, Wilding, Faith, and Wright, Michelle M., eds., Domain Errors! Cyberfeminist Practices (2002), 21.
[9] Fernandez, Wilding, and Wright, Domain Errors! Cyberfeminist Practices, 21.
[10] Hall, Kira, "Computer-mediated Communication: Linguistic, Social and Cross-cultural Perspectives," in Pragmatics & Beyond New Series, ed. Herring, Susan C. (John Benjamins, 1996), 148.
[11] Hall, "Computer-mediated Communication: Linguistic, Social and Cross-cultural Perspectives," 148.
[12] "Cyberfeminism Index," 2022, accessed July 5, 2024, https://cyberfeminismindex.com/.
Table of Contents
List of Figures 6
1.Introduction 10
1.1. Daoist Philosophy, Internet Technology, Cyberfeminism and Cosmotechnics: Narrow
Approaches to Human-Cyberspace Relationships 10
1.2. Two Key Problematics within Cyberfeminism 13
1.2.1. First Problematic: Manifesto, Utopia and Hyperstitional Logic 14
1.2.2. Second Problematic: Lack of Consideration of Post-Colonial Perspectives 18
1.3. Expanding Narrow Approaches to Human-Cyberspace Relationships 19
1.4. Art, Technology and Post-European Philosophy: Cosmotechnics, Techne, Technics 21
2. Chapter 1: Roots, Aesthetics, Cosmologies and Localities 26
2.1. Root: On Cosmotechnics 26
2.2. Aesthetics: On Shanshui (山水) Painting 29
2.3. On Daoism 33
2.3.1. Localities 33
2.3.2. Cosmologies 37
3. Chapter 2: Daoist Logic – “反者道之動 (Opposition, or turning back, constitutes the
dynamic of Dao)” 40
3.1. Daoist Logic of Shanshui (山水) 40
3.2. Xuan (玄) Logic: Recursivity, Oppositional Continuity and Oppositional Unity41
3.2.1 Recursivity 41
3.2.2. Oppositional Unity 44
3.2.3. Oppositional Continuity 46
4. Chapter 3: Daoist Logic of Shanshui (山水) – Early Spring (早春圖) by Guo Xi (郭熙) 49
4.1. Xing (形) and Xiang (象) 55
4.2. Xuan (玄) Logic 59
5. Chapter 4: The Mountain, The Water and The Alien – Basho, Hyperstition and
Cosmotechnics 63
5.1. Aesthetics: Shanshui (山水) and Xenofeminism 63
5.1.1. Hyperstitional Logic: Alien 68
5.1.2. Basho Logic: Mountain-Water 71
5.1.3. Cosmotechnics: Mountain-Water versus the Alien 74
6. Conclusion 78
6.1. Daoist Philosophy: Expanding Approaches to Human-Cyberspace Relationships 78
6.2. Cosmotechnics to Beyond 80
7. Appendix 84
7.1. Glossary of Chinese Terms and Concepts 84
7.2. Acknowledgements 87
8. Bibliography 89
Contact Lamceline.ty@gmail.com
2022 - 2024
Edition of 25
A3 riso print on Steinbeis 80gsm paper
Prelude
Children of the soil
Foetal mycelium
Embryonic rooting
There is death in the detritus
Children of the sun
Soles singed
Offering pearls of brine
Rotting, sticky and sweet
Children of the ineffable seas
Her heaving breath
Blinking cargo stars
Such porosity in our young souls
Children of the equatorial bloom
Folly in the foliage
Humid haze
Cognitive birth
Children of the monsoon tears
Humming thunder
The rainfall imbue our sins
Children of the sublime
Coming home
Their germination gerund
Pious to none
Filial to fear
Interlude
In the absence of piety
I mourn
I grieve
I say goodbye to all I know
In the absence of piety
I cry
I weep
I put it all to rest
In the absence of piety
I lose everything
For all I have is nothing
In the absence of piety
Everything seems meaningless
I crave for home
I love all beings
天下有始, 以为天下母。
(The world has a beginning, and it arose from the mother of the world.) – 道德经
In the absence of piety
Yet I still tether myself
Umbilical familiarity
The land holds me
In the absence of piety
A blade of grass pushes against the earth
That difficulty births beings in the material world
In the absence of piety
I am nothing
For I cannot fathom the mother
For I cannot fathom the sky, nor the earth
In the absence of piety
The heaven-being exists
有物混成，先天地生。寂兮寥兮，独立而不改，
周行而不殆，可以为天地母。吾不知其名，强字之曰道，强为之名曰大。
(There was something undefined and complete, coming into existence before Heaven and Earth.
How still it was and formless, standing alone, and undergoing no change, reaching everywhere and in no danger (of being exhausted)! It may be regarded as the Mother of all things.) – 道德经
In the absence of piety
I leave it to rest
For I do not know its name
In the absence of piety
There is death in the detritus
Such porosity in our young souls
Postlude
I hold no guilt and no shame. I do not grovel or beg for forgiveness from God, Heaven or the Earth.
I have everything yet nothing. I will always seek abundance within contentment.
Regardless of its nature, I attempt to hold all things with tenderness and strength. I long for things to pass time with me.
Regardless of my own shortcomings, I attend to making, processing, practicing and thinking. I attest to these difficulties.
My roots wilt when they are dry, my petals bloom when they are nourished. The change is what moves my being.
What I have found is the ultimate passing of time. The passing of time is the universal constant.
玄之又玄，衆妙之門。
(Xuan and again xuan, gate to all mysteries.) - 道德經
The recursivity, the oppositional continuity - 陰 (yin) and 陽 (yang). This is the logic – again, and again.
I stand, tethered to the material, between Heaven and Earth. A living creature unknowing of truth, unknowing of life or death, unknowing of good or bad.
Birth is a struggle, living is passing time. Death is easy.
Death in the Absence of Piety, 2024 (Incomplete)
Blue
Durational Performance
2.4 x 2.4m platform, tattoo equipment, hand-carved soapstone「乾」, 「坤」,「屯」seals, jungle soil
Performed at
Goldsmiths, University of London Undergraduate Fine Art Degree Show
London, United Kingdom
13 - 17 June 2024
It is an ode to life, death and the passing of time.
It is an ode to Heaven, Earth and the material creatures between them.
It is an ode to the difficulty of growth that comes with the passage of time.
Contact Lamceline.ty@gmail.com
£5 per print
Edition of 25
2.4 x 2.4m platform, tattoo equipment, hand-carved soapstone「乾」, 「坤」,「屯」seals, jungle soil
Performed at
Goldsmiths, University of London Undergraduate Fine Art Degree Show
Ben Pimlott Building, Level 3, Goldsmiths University of London
London, United Kingdom
13 - 17 June 2024
Phillip Lai
Sophie Seita
Evie Harrison
Lauren Swainbank
Xuan, Velda, Huda, Shiyun, Nereus, Danni, Ellie, Keelan, Bijou, Jude, Mikaela, Benedict, Arthur, Casey, Fernanda, Kansh
親愛的爸爸妈妈
June 2024
Figure 1. Ancient Chinese seal script character 靈 or ling, from Wikimedia Commons
In ancient Chinese seal script, as well as traditional Chinese script, the character 靈 or ling - meaning god, deity, soul or spirit - illustrates the importance of a medium in spiritual encounters in Taoist religion.
Figure 2. The characters that constitute 靈 or ling in ancient Chinese seal script, all images of Chinese seal script characters from Wikimedia Commons
The seal script character of 靈 or ling depicts a shaman calling for rain to fall. This notion of shamanistic practice as medium for spirituality in Taoism is inherently implied in the construction of this character that reflects the spiritual and the rituals surrounding it. We can expand this understanding of medium beyond the spirit medium towards media and mediation between the contrasting realms of spirituality and digitality.
Teo’s practice acknowledges the criticality of medium in relation to the spiritual and digital. The meanings inscribed into the form of the character 靈 or ling is elucidated in her most recent work, space as traces.
Central to spaces as traces is a keen recognition of medium extending beyond the traditional confines of the spirit medium in Taoist religious practice. Teo achieves this through three key lines of inquiry:
- If meatspace is mediated by digitality - or the cyberspace, is there a place for spirituality to exist within this mediation?
- If spirituality does exist within this mediation, how does the role of a spirit medium transform and does this role of a medium become analogous to that of the digital?
- If we were to view such encounters with the spiritual and spirit mediums as performance and language, can filmmaking be a medium for mediating this complex intersection between cyberspace, meatspace and spiritual realms?
Along such lines of inquiry, Teo notes that “the role of a spirit medium progresses along with technology”. spaces as traces is an ode to the flux between technology and spirituality in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic where “spirit mediums take their presence online”, according to Teo. Observing how mediums have connected to audiences to aid with inquiry to Taoist gods and spirits, media such as livestreaming have altered the fundamental role of the spirit medium, allowing them to take on a new meaning and significance.
Throughout Teo’s oeuvre (with the short film ‘a tale of ula-nara’, a fictional xianxia tale of achieving transcendence from mortality and ‘蝴蝶山;NOW, THEN’, a documentary-fiction film installation offering a contemporary take on the wuxia genre of Chinese cinema and documenting Singaporean Taoist spirit medium ceremonies using archival footage), filmmaking is buttressed as a medium of transformation, translation and transcription of narratives - both fictional and non-fiction. Through interplay of her extensive archiving of Taoist ritual and practice in Singapore and her interest in contemporary Chinese mytho-fiction, Teo has developed an aesthetic that seeks to mediate such spiritual, fictional and digital experiences. She synthesizes realms that house these seemingly opposing narratives through time-based media, yet tethers the audience to a material sensuality and experiential space through evocative installations alluding to spaces particular to Singaporean culture.
Teo explains that “what was captured is never a definite truth”. Her practice of documentation and archiving asserts a longing for truth-seeking, yet it also nods to the impossibility of achieving this truth. According to Teo, “filmmaking is one of the many mediums to mediate these spaces, as we document our relationships, helping us understand how we interact and exchange ideas using the digital space.” spaces as traces wields filmmaking as a tool for collective memory-seeking - allowing the audience to seek these ephemeral, fleeting fragments of information and reality within fiction and documentation in tandem with Teo’s enduring wish to excavate meaning within the thresholds of reality, spirit, gods and storytelling.
spaces as traces exists as work of Teo’s devotion towards stories, memory-recording and an everlasting quest for truth within liminal realms of sensual spirituality and narratives.
Digital Spirits in Religion and Media: Possession and Performance by Alvin Eng Hui Lim
Review written for
Shiyun Teo First Solo Exhibition
spaces as traces
Feelium Gallery
14 - 17 June 2024
shiyunteo.com
4 x 4 x 5 cm white soapstone, 鄧散木 seal script carving
(Carved for 萱)
White soapstone with Chinese lion carving, seal script carving
Gifted to 萱, with love
xuanyeo.com
Her practice is often grounded in concepts of Mahāyāna Buddhism and in karma. The making of her work thus functions as anti-productive, anti-individual and anti-expressive: through meditation and labour, they are mutually formulaic and repetitive. They require a simultaneous annihilation and regeneration, a reflection of 无我 (no-self) and of 慈悲 (compassion).
Blue is also DJ 小 HIAO
HIAO, 2023