Yayoi Kambara with David Hodge and Hi-Jin Kang Hodge. Who Do You Trust?, April 20, 2017 (performance still). Courtesy of the Asian Art Museum, San Francisco. Photo: Quincy Stamper.

Dance is a powerful medium in which to explore trust. When dancing, a dancer must have physical self-confidence, letting their body go in order to flow with music and through space. A dancer must open up for corporeal proximity as other bodies touch and lean on one’s own form. A dancer must further trust the audience in their sensitivity and capacity to feed the dancers through their energy. Trust provides the ground for any dance performance to flourish.

Who Do You Trust? was an interactive dance performance choreographed by Yayoi Kambara and video work by David Hodge and Hi-Jin Kang Hodge, and presented on April 20, 2017, as a part of the Asian Art Museum’s Artists Drawing Club series. In a hospitable institutional frame, this piece was an invitation for the audience and the dancers to establish, through dance, a mutual trust bond.

The performance took place in the museum’s ballroom-like space, Samsung Hall. A large-scale screen divided the space in two symmetrical parts and played a video on loop. The film presented an intimate portrayal of the dancers’ understanding of trust and its implications in life. The confidential tone of this video, accompanied by soulful background cello music and the soft illumination of the space, generated an atmosphere of openness, demonstrating trust in the audience while inviting them to reciprocate.

As the dancers came into the left side of the space, the video continued looping for the entirety of the piece. Several audience members were invited to participate in the live dance. Throughout the performance, the dancers alternated taking care of and guiding the selected audience through space, by holding their hands and utilizing them as support for balance and jumps. Midway through the piece, the dancers switched to the right half of the room, where a couple of chairs were. As the dancers sat with the participants, the dancers asked them to touch both of their hearts, a request followed by the dancers’ poetic and extensive movements around the selected audience’s bodies.

The rest of the audience seemed to feel the need to support these acts of intimacy by opening up to the possibility to feel themselves through the performers and see the performers in themselves. Who Do You Trust? was a heartfelt proposal that utilized dance to collectively explore the corporeal and emotional potentialities of trust in order to arrive at a more sensitive human experience.

Who Do You Trust? took place on April 20, 2017.

Sofia Villena Araya is a Costa Rican artist based in San Francisco. Her present work is an exploration of the intersections between drawing and dance.

Teiji Furuhashi. Lovers, 1994; computer controlled, five-channel laser disc/sound installation with five projectors, two sound systems, two slide projectors, and slides (color, sound). Courtesy of the Museum of Modern Art. © 2016 Dumb Type.

Standing solemnly as an apocalyptic coda to Nan Goldin: The Ballad of Sexual Dependency (1985) at the Museum of Modern Art, Teiji Furuhashi: Lovers features an eponymous installation that invites viewers to interact with bare apparitions through multimedia technology. In contrast to the Goldin’s brutal details of sex, drugs, and violence during the 1980s in Lower Manhattan, Lovers (1994) displays nudity in an austere, almost asexual manner. Nonetheless, the Japanese artist addresses contemporary love from a similar standpoint as his intense New York neighbor: ars longa, vita brevis. This marks the first time Lovers has been exhibited since its inauguration at MoMA in 1995, one year before the artist’s death of AIDS-related complications at thirty-five. Reiterating the universality of alienation, especially the isolation of sexual minorities, the exhibition is particularly pertinent today, as discrimination has resurfaced since the recent presidential election.

The monumental entrance of Lovers starkly displays the artist’s name and the artwork title high above my head. Below, a sea of funereal blackness confronts my eyes. Such design seems to suggest that I should not enter if I am afraid. So I do.

The chamber looks like a minimalist coffin. Enormous black walls ascend to borderless ceilings, enveloping the cavernous space in a cosmic void. The ivory floor gleams as my eyes adjust. A tower of seven stacked-up projectors rotates at the center, emitting beams of light like a lighthouse. Five life-size, naked figures appear on the facades. Men and women, translucent apparitions, move and pose in nonchalant elegance. They are silhouettes of the artist and his friends. At times, these “lovers” walk and run toward each other. However, once the distance diminishes, their ghostly bodies overlap and never touch, as if they exist in parallel universes. The sound of wind chimes adds to the dreamlike atmosphere.

Motion-sensors detect me as I, too, circulate. A man on the screen opens his arms like the Vitruvian Man. As I approach him, a vertical beam of light appears with a programmed text “limit” attached to it. He fades into the abyss. A woman, in slow motion, cradles my shadow in her arms. The message is disillusioning. This is an interactive experience that challenges the possibility of true interaction. Lovers left me with a vulnerable feeling of ephemerality and bleakness. I wish there was something concrete to alleviate the effect, even a press release to anchor me. Instead, I walk out with nothing other than an empty embrace of an apparition. Strangely, it lingers longer than a real one.

Teiji Furuhashi: Lovers is on view through April 16, 2017.

Bai Yuting is an independent curator and writer. She is also a Curatorial Fellow at the School of Visual Arts in New York.