We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful D. Tai Tai. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with D. below.

Hi D., thanks for joining us today. What were some of the most unexpected problems you’ve faced in your career and how did you resolve those issues?

My art making process crosses multiple media. It usually begins with a performance idea. The idea explores how texture and weight of the body parts interact with each other and the spaces around them. With my 15 years of movement training (contemporary dance, weight lifting and Iyengar yoga) the intricacies of those relationships and depth of emotional connection inspire a desire to solidify these ephemeral qualities into objects for others to project and contemplate on.

One of my latest works from the end of my graduate school was called Mold Resiliency. It began as an exploration of the behavior of gelatin and clay. I had been working with gelatin throughout my entire first year of graduate school due to its soft and tough properties, akin to the body. I was marveled with how quickly it turned from a tough material that was hard to scrape off to one that was soft and wiped away easily with boiling water. To give form to this material, I created a plaster cast I made from squished beauty product bottles and filled it with this gelatin clay.

When it was dried, the material began molding the cast and creating spots on the plaster. The weight of the object was resonant to objects used in my Strongman practice. Due to the absence of light that molded the cast, I decided to coat wax onto the gelatin-clay mixture and make the object a candle. That object was used in a performance to commune with the drawings of Heather Kai Smith and objects of Ali Feser at Logan Center Exhibitions. I am now working to give form to the residues of the gelatin-clay-wax pieces. To commemorate the performance, Mold Resiliency is manifested in photographs of the molded cast facing off with a headless figure of myself, the earlier printed on vinyl, the latter on hahnemuhle paper.

I see echoes between the way living beings treat their bodies with the way they treat objects around them. My movement research results in verbs (pull, push, spread, press, etc.) and conditions (heat, wind, cold) that I translate into actions on how to treat materials (gelatin, plastic, clay.) That is how an idea for an object begins. Through these processes, I have made ceramics and photographs.

D., love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?

I grew up in Taiwan, Brazil, Venezuela, Mexico, and El Salvador. I came to the US when I was 18. Since then I have lived in St. Louis, New York, Oakland, and Chicago. Historically, I performed under the name, Tina Wang. As a dancer, my goals were to entertain and mold myself to the standards of virtuosic movements. As C. Tai Tai, I was interested in challenging my past creations of only evoking catharsis. Today, using D. Tai Tai as a moniker, I hope to create absurdist and contemplative sculptures and photographs for others.

Negotiating freedom in self expression with comfort and fragility of belonging are key themes in my work. By inconveniencing the resistant body with burdensome organic and inorganic objects, I challenge assumptions about where these objects belong, who belongs with them, and their relationship to living bodies. Feeling “at home” has been a core topic since I began working in the arts in 2010. I began as a dancer experimenting with what movements could communicate a gamut of experiences of being human, from defeat to resilience. I continued my research as a performance artist, testing which visual scenes of found materials activated by body movements shows how a singular body manages culturally imposed norms. And now as a sculptor, I ask how the residues left by the body and its parts in performance become reassembled and distilled into an object that critiques the way societal norms confines and distracts an individual’s journey to self actualization.

Involving objects is a way for me to bring to nuance the varying qualities of connection between people and the things around them. My work uses densely textured objects to ask questions about the unity of the human body and the life of still objects. I investigate how the body can be “discomposed” into object parts and how objects can be fashioned to a person so that the objects appear to have life. How does the stuff we use become part of us? How do we become mere stuff? I question whether creating a meditative atmosphere in performance involving abstract human body movement and objects that hold context of their own in society can be a way to open the imagination of the viewer in how they engage with other objects and people around them.

With my travels and a decade of work across the gig economy (service, dance, translation, yoga), my body holds vivid traces of the isolation, loneliness, and pressure to conform I felt throughout the many transitions. Those memories have inspired me to make work rooted in the humor and resilience I needed to cope with varying and rigid norms. I consider how catharsis is a tool of community building– how absurdist images and senseless labor can shed one’s guard and open one up to others for dialogue.

Have you ever had to pivot?

https://medium.com/@tinawang07/permission-to-touch-a-virtual-real-performer-fcd9c63cfe7f

Is there mission driving your creative journey?

Identity, fragility, and resilience are key themes in my work, which draws on my experience as a Taiwanese citizen raised in Latin America. My performances create playful and dramatic relationships between human body parts and inanimate objects. My objects shape the ordinary messes into personal and quiet experiences that others can use to digest their own past experiences and future wishes. While doing so, I invite audiences to take a fresh look at differences between motion and stillness, animate and inanimate, human and non-human.

Contact Info:

• Instagram: taitaistudios