Playing the Mountain is an artistic research project investigating balance as the dynamic interplay of yinyang, through the practice of taijiquan (a Chinese internal martial art). Based on this embodied practice, I explore balance not as a state but as movement, by transposing this dynamic of opposing forces into a constellation of participatory, sculptural and expanded cinema forms. Drawing on principles of Chinese aesthetics from a diasporic perspective, Playing the Mountain deploys artistic strategies to consider agency, (non-)presence, tension, and resistance.

The project aims to pay heightened attention to public spaces in cities on several levels. The first follows the trend of newly developed privately owned public spaces (known as POPS), which establish a precedent for how corporations and cities define public space and what they prioritize within it. A clear focus on people as consumers – rather than citizens – have several effects, including strict restrictions, the creation of societies of control (Deleuze 1992: 3), and various forms of often indirect exclusion of certain groups of inhabitants.