My first performance art in Wandering Scholars, Chinese University of Hong Kong

The Burning Ritual

30th, May 2014

The Chinese traditional ritual paper offerings are objects made of paper, many of them handmade and one of a kind, which are offered to the beings residing beyond the world of the living: the gods, the ghosts and the ancestors. Nearly all these paper items are burned in order to reach their destination in the other world. It have been central to Chinese culture for millennia and as a public, visual display of spiritual belief, they are still evident today in Hong Kong and China. (Janet Lee Scott, For Gods, ghosts and ancestors : the Chinese tradition of paper offerings 2007)

In this performance, we will walk around the boundary of CUHK and perform our ritual there, so why do we burn or sacrifice academic paper?

To pay tribute to the pioneers of CUHK or let them read your paper

To spread your notions to the Chinese spirit world

To take your knowledge out of the material world

To embrace new idea by destroying the old one

To burn the polished, lifeless formatted academic paper and dissemination.

To cease your hatred to the paper hopefully

Wandering Scholars is an interdisciplinary symposium about contemporary culture, art, media and scholarship that focuses on acts of “walking” and “wandering” as strategies of thought and expression. It will consider the importance of processes of walking, elements of distraction, chaos, non-productivity, non-linearity and “failure”, as well as the fascination of a peripatetic way of disseminating knowledge. Whether we are making solitary journeys or moving in groups, we are constantly drifting and perceiving with five senses, or using technological devices, while sensing the rhythms and languages constituted by spaces, times and people. The symposium invites artists, scholars and audiences to develop participatory modes of education as acts of walking.

http://www.wanderingscholars.com.hk/