Tingyi Jiang
Tingyi Jiang
Tingyi Jiang is a multidisciplinary artist and performer based in The Hague. She graduated from the ArtScience Interfaculty at the Royal Academy of Art and the Conservatory of The Hague and is this year’s winner of the iii Encouragement Opportunity (before: iii Residency Award), awarded now for the fourth time to a fresh graduate of the Royal Academy of Art The Hague.
Tingyi is deeply interested in ‘performance as a means of engaging with the world’, a concept she explores through her practice, what she calls “situation-specific performance.” This practice is about “fitting,” where “fitting” becomes a method of learning, reflecting, and creating, creating a space in between. Her work delves into how these phenomena relate to societal systems and influence our everyday behaviours. Tingyi claims “situation” as a stage, appropriates “rules” as a score, and uses “action” as material for her work. By repeating, reconfiguring, and reconstructing these elements, she creates new theatrical and fictional situations that blend reality and fiction. Audience interaction and response are often integral to her performances, and feed back into the situation.
Within this framework, she investigates themes of identity, memory, the performativity of language, and the relationship between the individual and authority.
During the Residency
During her residency at iii, Tingyi will continue to develop her graduation project, Make It Fit.
Make It Fit is a performance that functions as speech, manifesto, poetry, concert, and ritual. It constructs a theatrical situation through the precise composition of spoken words, live instruments, scenography, and meticulous mechanical enactments. The phrase “Make It Fit” recurs throughout the performance in varying contexts and rhythms, appropriating the language of propaganda through grotesque chanting, disassembling, contextualising, and repeating. The impossibility of perfect execution of the ‘script’ introduces awkwardness and humour, creating absurdity within a solemn scenario. The self behind the authoritative character gradually emerges, revealing vulnerability beneath the rigorous apparatus and personal memories shaped by collective consensus.
Make It Fit explores the performances and performativity of both individuals and authorities within the context of social norms, examining how these normalised social actions and artistic performances interact. This simple yet abstract phrase generates the fictional ideology of “Make It Fit-ism.” It provokes diverse questions: What is fit? How to fit? Why fit? While we search for a ‘fitting’ way to escape the confines of ‘fitting in,’ we also yearn for the security and comfort that ‘fitting’ brings.
In the coming four-week residency, she will deepen her research into the performativity of language: written scripts, forms of reiteration, the qualities of voice, and the connotations of accent in different contexts. Her research approach treats artistic method as another layer of language, striving to find a balance between sound and sense, signal and noise, narrative and poetry. Additionally, she plans to develop a technical system and performance score that hold the potential for unpredictability or even breakdown, allowing precise compositions to embrace unexpected outcomes and lose control. This exploration will involve stage design, lighting, sound, and action. In terms of performance, she will further experiment with the transitions between being “inside” and “outside” the stage, character, script, and fiction.
