the world accelerates, she slows us down—with intention, with breath.
In Soft Acts of Resistance, interdisciplinary artist Siyuan Meng presents a trilogy of works that unfold across live performance, moving image, and screendance. Anchored in somatic sensitivity, her practice explores the sensing body as ritual space—where perception, memory, and transformation quietly take shape. Through minimal gesture, elemental material, and the aesthetics of slowness, Meng offers not spectacle, but a felt invitation to presence.
The trilogy—Porous, Body Trip, and Rye—moves between mediums and continents, yet shares one unflinching commitment: to reclaim softness as a radical form of embodied knowledge.
Porous
Live Performance | Regent’s Canal, London | Canal Dream Art Festival 2023
Organised by Canal Dream CIC & Slash Arts; in collaboration with Word on the Water, Global Generation, Floating Garden, Dangerous Kitchen, Aranya Theater Festival (China)
Performed on a drifting boat along Regent’s Canal, Porous becomes a slow, site-responsive ritual. Within a skeletal shelter of branches and gauze, the performer leans, folds, and breathes—interrupting the hardness of the urban skyline. Here, movement is attunement: to water, wind, and strangers on the towpath.
Porosity, in Meng’s hands, becomes political—a soft refusal of rigidity, an embodied openness in the face of structural pressure.
Body Trip
Moving Image | 2023 | Screened at Close-Up Cinema, London (February 2023)
Body Trip explores the body in motion as a vessel of memory and migration. Through quiet repetition, walking, and return, the camera becomes a co-sensing presence—tracing the emotional textures of grief, distance, and becoming. Influenced by Daoist non-duality and diasporic embodiment, the work resists linearity in favor of cyclical knowing.
The result is a meditative offering: the body does not move to arrive, but to return—to the present, to presence, to breath.
Rye
Screendance | 2023 | Screened at:
– London Design Festival
– Canal Dream Art Festival (London)
– FRAMERUSH Screendance Festival (London)
– Slash Arts
– Aranya Theater Festival (Migratory Birds 300), China
In Rye, a screendance work of quiet resonance, two women meet across space and time. Their gestures—soft, repetitive, elemental—speak to unspoken memory and embodied connection. Shot in the landscape of Rye, the film unfolds like a dream between eras, blending surreal stillness with tactile intimacy.
Rather than explain, Rye holds space—for feeling, for quiet, for what remains unsaid. Here, movement is a ritual of return.
Across all three works, Meng’s artistic voice remains clear and committed: slow, elemental, and relational. In a saturated world of acceleration and hyperproduction, Soft Acts of Resistance offers an urgent counter-methodology—where care is power, and the body is not a tool, but a place to dwell.
