Paris Live Art Tour 10
curated by CaiQing
executive curation by WeiZen Ho and Liu Xue
jointly supported by Rue Française plateforme creative pour le’art (10-14 Oct)
and extending into public space interventions across Paris, Fontainebleau, and Art Basel at the Grand Palais.
10-25 October, 2025
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I am urged by a curiosity to compare and contrast the social pathways between public spaces and landmarks, and internal spaces in buildings across Australian and international sociocultural landscapes; to open up the potential and increase my capacity for mapping performance trajectories with a more intimate geo-social relationship. The hope is to chance upon accidental performance ideas and situational intersections, which disrupt prescriptive spatial and compositional boundaries. The practice underscoring the Paris project is rooted in an awareness of how much physical reality and personal narratives dynamically interweave. Traversing these spaces, we carry within us past experiences—fragments of memory and preconceptions merge with the present moment. This melding can perhaps challenge each engagement into a dialogic performance between the self, materiality in human culture, the space and place.
The Paris Live Art Tour 10 provided a platform for exploring the transformational potential of devising dynamic and social participatory performance-installations within urban sites, which plays between the thresholds of public, outdoor and private indoor domains. This investigative framework allows me to explore how the history and memory of a body and a place converge, and how we may attempt to embrace what we experience of a place, beyond what we merely perceive to be relevant.
The background story before the physical process of making took place in Paris.
A couple of weeks before the Paris Live Art Tour began, on the evening of 16 September, I received a message from Cai Qing asking to talk. His wife had been undergoing chemotherapy and had fallen into a coma - it was the forty-second day. The long and short of it was that Liu Xue, a visual artist based in Frankfurt, and I stepped in to roll out Paris Live Art Tour for 25 international artists who flew from China, Japan, India and Europe. The focus was ensuring that the gift of the project space by Bonnie Tchien, on No.3 Rue Française was used wisely.
Please bear in mind that the images of the works below were not made in isolation and resulted from multiple negotiations with the temporary collective of artists, spatial, time and material constraints, as well as the context of place. The other complication was that artists were arriving at different dates and time continually. After the first week of programming, we had to announce to the group that as the presentation graduated to the greater public space of Paris, away from the Rue Française project space as an anchoring space, all artists had to be partnered up and take responsibility for announcing place and time of their performances on Group Chats.
Statements of Reflective Gold, in tandem performance with Dagmar I. Glausnitzer-Smith, Rue Française, Plateforme créative pour l’art, 10 Oct, 2025. Photos by Liu Xue, ZhonruiZhang and DengZhen.
The facilitation of the performance artists from China was eased with Liu Xue’s mediation and the fact that he was living with them in the 9th arrondissement. Zhang ZhongRui and Deng Zhen assisted in the process. The documentation responsibility fell mainly on Liu Xue and Deng Zhen.
We not only began sharing works, but also formalized artist talks that compared and contrasted performance-art practices shaped by different cultural geographies. For example, the intentions and embodied vocabularies of performance art that emerged from visual-art practitioners in Europe differed from those in China and other parts of Asia, where the use of the body in art was framed through the notion of “behaviour art.” We were also only beginning to unpack the language used in the performing arts as opposed to performance art: how philosophical intent and historical modes produced such different motivations within the two fields of body-based practice. Li Wake (often known as “Wake”), a performance and media artist from Northeast China who has been practicing since the 1980s, offered a simple perspective when we discussed the responsibility of the artist:
“…WITNESS…”
This question arose from a conversation sparked by an experimental documentary he made—controversial, of course—filmed with a hidden camera on the grounds of a school for students with diverse hearing abilities. The film was created in 2005 for the 100th anniversary of Chinese film titled "Big Sound"《震耳欲聋》, and will eventually be part of the Chinese Independent Film Archive.
Below: ‘Breathing Threads’ performance-installation by WeiZen Ho in tandem performance with Dagmar I. Glausnitzer-Smith’s ‘Lost Pages’, Rue Française, Plateforme créative pour l’art, Paris, 11 Oct 2025. Photos and Video by DengZhen.
Above: Public Performance Interventions in tandem by Miray Shinan, WeiZen Ho and Dagmar I. Glausnitzer-Smith, Rue Poissonnière Paris, 13 Oct 2025. Photos by Eva Dabara.
Below: ‘Let Me Cover You’ by WeiZen Ho, participatory, Rue Poissonnière Paris, 13 Oct 2025. Photos by Eva Dabara and DengZhen.
‘Topeng Dikonstruksi - Ampelas’ by WeiZen Ho, in tandem by Dagmar I. Glausnitzer-Smith, Viktor Fucek and Olivia Hassett, Rue Beauregard, Paris, 13 Oct 2025. Photos by Olivia Hassett and Viktor Fucek.
‘Smoke and Clouds’ by WeiZen Ho, in tandem performance with Viktor Fucek. Stairs at Bonne Nouvelle, Paris, 13 Oct 2025. Photos by Dagmar I. Glausnitzer-Smith
‘…them sprites lonelied forth…’ dusk performance by WeiZen Ho, Rue du Croissant, 14th Oct 2025. Photo by Dagmar I. Glausnitzer-Smith.
‘The Great Divide’ by WeiZen Ho, Ermitage de Pompadour, Fontainebleau (Seine-et-Marne), 17 Oct 2025. Photos by DengZhen; joined later with performance actions by ZhongRui and DengZhen.
Below are public performance interventions at Basel Art:
Statements of Reflective Gold by WeiZen Ho, Grand Palais, Paris, 25 Oct 2025. Photos by Zhang ZhongRui, DengZhen and Santos Guichon.
Topeng Dikonstruksi - Ampelas by WeiZen Ho, Grand Palais, Paris, 25 Oct 2025. Photos by Zhang ZhongRui and DengZhen.
Smoke and Clouds by WeiZen Ho, Grand Palais, Paris, 25 Oct 2025. Photos by Zhang ZhongRui and DengZhen
Paris Live Art Tour 10 is a durational performance project that unfolds across sites in Paris, probing the charged seams between ritual, choreography and installation. Through solo, ensemble and participatory formats, the work stages extended temporal experiences—durational interventions that slow perception, invite collective attention and allow subtle shifts in presence to emerge. Participants and passersby become co-conspirators in a moving archive of memory and gesture, as the tour traces how urban landscapes carry, resist and in a heterotopic manner, reconfigure embodied narratives.