A performance with Tom Lovelace, Wuchao Feng, Xiaoyu Wang and Sharon Young

Lines of Convergence and Resistance

In this collaborative performance artists Wuchao Feng, Tom Lovelace, Xiaoyu Wang and Sharon Young bring their practices together to create points of convergence at the fountains at Fellowship Square.

Xiaoyu Wang uses walking and a paper sculpture to reflect on language, wordlessness and miscommunication. Sharon Young uses automatic writing to offer small acts of resistance. Wuchao Feng expresses the fluidity of identity and interconnection among us through writing on land with water. Tom Lovelace responds to the fountain architecture, using circles, arcs and water as prompts and materials to create ephemeral connections with strangers. In this live enactment the artists intervene in each other’s practices to disrupt, support and create a new flow between pre-existing narratives. This emerging convergence is suggestive of intersectional dynamics at play in complex notions of cultural identity, socio-political structures, the ephemeral, empathy, resistance and the limitations of language. Each artist employs their body in the production of conceptual art works. Through walking and making this performance invites the audience to consider how we can come together through difference.

Wuchao Feng is a Chinese artist who is currently studying at the Royal College of Art. She received her Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2020. Through the use of natural metaphors, particularly water, in her art practice, she advocates for a new definition of identity as a fluid state. She finds solace in the tranquil embodiment of water, a form of oceanic therapy that soothes her soul and helps her recognize the unbreakable bond between herself and nature.

Tom Lovelace is a London based artist, working across photography, performance and sculpture. Underpinning themes of research encompass an enquiry into the languages and legacies of abstraction, phenomenology and photography, and the materialities of time and light. Since 2017, Lovelace has been developing the Living Pictures, presenting fluid, collaborative exhibition spaces, exploring moments in art history and sites of architecture through a convergence of performance and photography. As a lecturer Lovelace works at the Royal College of Art, University for the Creative Arts and Glasgow School of Art.

Xiaoyu Wang is an artist who expresses herself mainly through sculpture and performance. She’s currently studying at the University of the Arts London, Camberwell College of Arts. Her work often begins with a sense of absurdity in everyday life, and focuses on themes of repetition and fragility. She’s used to working with ready-mades and looking for symbols to express her ideas through media mixing. 

Sharon Young is an artist and lecturer based in London. Her practice spans photography, performance and writing. Her recent PhD research was concerned with representations of hysteria in art works and seeks to move away from scrutinising imagery in an attempt to use photography and art practice to listen to what the hysteric might have to say. Her image-text book Ms B; the Hysterical Episodes (2022), positions herself in identification with the hysteric alongside Freud’s patients of hysteria (1896), and the protagonist from Madame Bovary (1853). Sharon is a lecturer in photography, fine art and performance at various institutions including UAL, Ithaca College, Boston University and the Royal College of Art.