Can you explain how the process works? 

Five performers eavesdrop on conversations within the event and steal—or borrow—people’s words. Then they uploaded those collected lines in real-time on the exhibition’s Facebook page. The performers also took turns to read them out loud on an amplifier to the crowd.

What inspired you to come up with this idea?

I had worked on performance art before, and I wondered, why should performance art be done at all when society already pressures us to perform all the time. What’s the use of it? The work here serves as a feedback loop to the existing performance. It’s performed performance, with action that doesn’t act. My interest is in what art can do, to be critical.

What do people take from it?

The work offers people a moment to step back and re-examine things out of context. Not only that, the exhibition features many works that make bold political statements, but there are also politics within the viewers. It’s like watching a DVD and the disc stutters. That moment kind of pulls you out of the moment. It’s not a moment of enlightenment, but of being lost. 

So it’s not really about making a statement.

Actually, I think my work annoyed the attendants at the time; it was like bothersome flies. There’s a comedic side to the performance because, in fact, it can be deemed cruel or even antagonistic as you had people drinking, chatting in front of the politically-serious art. But our work doesn’t look to criticize what people did on the day. It’s just a concept. Instead of putting a mirror somewhere, we take the mirror to people. 

What can we read into the words collected?

We had a wide range of words from “I’ll have beer,” “fatter,” “looks like your sister” to “yellow shirt is below. The red shirt is up there.” But even simple lines like “congratulations,” “great work” or “hi, how are you?” are a form of politics.