What if tomorrow you awoke with no pain? No sting of shock-snarled nerves, no swelling ache behind the eye sockets. You do not feel the tightening of your chest, the cold taunt of another morning, because there is no sickness to fear. 

It began with the eyes, a sandpaper grate. Some days blinking feels like scraping off layers of eyeball, and you imagine peeling it like an onion.

Then came the infection. And another—a side effect of misprescribed medication.

Fatigue. Burning skin.

Tangles of hair between wet fingers.

You are told to stop working at the agency but you can’t afford to lose your insurance. You are told to stop writing, to stop looking so intently—give less to the things you love. You obey for a while but the pain of this is even worse, the dullness, the metallic taste on bridled tongue.

A disempowered body yearns for metamorphosis. What breakages bode (re)generative possibilities? What vestigial afflictions may yet accrue? In Angela Su’s Juliette (2019), an anatomical diagram of a torso is stitched in human hair on off-white fabric. The body teems with biomorphic forms: rhizomes sprouting from truncated limbs, a burst of trumpet-shaped fungi in place of a head. Juliette is a site of violent rupture and hybridity that defies scientific taxonomies or classical representations of nature’s ideal forms. The medium itself whispers of rebellious transmutation: restricted from certain spiritual practices, Buddhist women in late-imperial China embroidered devotional images with hair plucked from their own heads—an embodied conjuring of the divine.

Is it delusional to seek corporeal transcendence? The titular character of Su’s video The Magnificent Levitation Act of Lauren O (2022) comes to believe she can fly after a nightmare in which she repeatedly falls to her death. Archival clips of aircraft, trapeze artists, and countercultural happenings in the 1960s flash by as the narrator expounds on the institutionalized protagonist’s “psychosis” and the state suppression of an underground anarchist group with which she claims to be involved. The video ends with a contorted Su-as-Lauren being hoisted up and transforming into a disco ball within a prison of gray foam spikes. There is wonder and pathos in the story of Lauren O, who represents both a body and a body politic longing for an improbable escape, finding freedom in a held breath 15 feet in the air.

“If life is a bottomless abyss, my endless fall is also a kind of flight,” wrote the poet and photographer Ren Hang in his blog series My Depression.* Some of his most poignant images are of nude bodies poised in careful equilibrium, evoking a palpable sense of gravitational exertion. In Untitled 34 (2012), a man is enfolded between the arms of two standing figures, their bare skin vulnerable and soft against the craggy landscape. Shot on a rooftop, Untitled 21 (2012) portrays a woman leaning back for a kiss from a lover, their gently curving physiques forming an arch against a smoggy backdrop of buildings. Ren’s sculptural compositions of the body display a casual nakedness that speaks of intimacy; indeed, his friends made frequent subjects. Some works bring the lens even closer, as in Untitled 11 (2011), in which interlocking legs appear suspended amid a dark void—a tumble in gravity and time arrested in the artist’s attentive gaze. Ren was 29 when he ended his life in 2017, days after opening a show titled Human Love.

How does a body survive pain? There are so many ways to hurt amid the bitter betrayals of biology and authority, the lacerations of an embattled mind. Can one in a state of fracture and constraint assert an expansive existence by refiguring the body and its limits? Or attenuate precarity by leaning towards love? Suffering curtails the imagination, abets a forsaking of all tomorrows. Perhaps it is enough for now to be devoted and desirous. A body falling, falling, still dreaming of flight.

*Translated by the author from Chinese.

Ophelia Lai is a writer and editor based in Hong Kong. Her work has been published in Frieze, Artforum, Spike Art Magazine, ArtReview Asia, ArtAsiaPacific, Ocula, and Artsy.