Four ways I move through the world: desire, stupidity, politics, and care.
DESIRE
Desire is big. A problem. is not . A problem?.
POLITICS
hope one day I won’t have to make political art
emtiness
so...
CARE
I am born on Earth, I care about you
I am born on Earth, I cannot understand you
Owa Mesa,Born in Northwest China, based in Berlin.
Her practice spans performance, video, writing, and social activism.
Raised in a family environment where sex work and mining intersected, and growing up in the multi-ethnic cultural crossroads of Northwest China, her early experiences of migration and gender, followed by her public and political engagements beginning at age 22, have led her to maintain a sustained focus on the relationships between the body, desire, identity, social systems, and the projections of the Other.
After leaving her hometown at age 17 due to her sexual minority identity, She gradually settled into the way of being that felt most natural to her.she chose to exist with a fluid gender expression—Ladyboy (transgender woman)—as she grew up. She says this is a response to the attitude behind the question she was asked since childhood: “Which do you love more, your mom or your dad?”
These experiences and identity choices have made her sensitive to the performance of desire and identity. When meeting strangers, the first question she is often asked is: “Are you a man or a woman?”So she focuses on how people establish relationships of desire within different cultural contexts and social situations.
Simultaneously, through the construction of narratives, she attempts to address the communication challenges arising from differing attitudes toward desire, identity, and lived experience across various forms of self-identification.
In recent years, her work has increasingly engaged with migration, exile, public events, and the relationship between personal experience and larger historical forces. Through performance, moving image, and community-based projects, she explores how individuals continue to exist beyond the identities, narratives, and documents that attempt to define them.
(Zen meditation) forms a crucial foundation of her practice. In daily life, many spontaneous actions do not stem from preconceived notions but from responses in the moment—those that occur before thought, generated jointly by the body, the environment, and the interplay of causes and conditions.
( )'s Love focused on taking a shit in Colored Darkness.
