Kaidie's 1000-Day Trans-Run 12.12.2009 - 09.09.2012
Kai Syng Tan
Studio practice title:
Kaidie's 1000-Day Trans-Run
12.12.2009 - 09.09.2012
Written thesis title: Trans-running, a Playful way of Running Literally and Figuratively via the Correlation of Body, Mind, City, Technology, State and Art:
An Interdisciplinary and Cross-Cultural Discourse Towards the Cultivation of a
Methodology to Navigate, Negotiate and Transform One's World Today
Kaidie runs to look for a/the Meaning of Life - but what a quixotic quest. For starters, 'run' refers not only to the sport and locomotion, but figures of speech including 'letting your imagination run wild' and 'being on the run'. Kaidie is so peripatetic that she traverses within, across and beyond dimensions actual (including the city of 'Nondon'), virtual, digital and imagined.
The hypothesis is itself an exuberant mapping of various wisdoms, including sport science ('runner's high' from endorphins), anthropology (the practice of endurance hunting in mankind 2 millions years ago), the Chinese tradition of Taoism ('body as world, world as body', philosophy (correlative thinking, a spatial, nonlinear mode of thinking), film (The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner; Run Lola Run), as well as follows the footsteps of the Situationists’ rebellious urban tactics. With all the restless running about, the lines between fiction and reality are blurred, too, since Kaidie is played by Kai Syng Tan (Biennale of Sydney 2006; Guangzhou Triennale 2008; San Francisco International Film Festival Merit Award for experimental video 1999; Transmediale 2000, The Most Promising Young Artist Award 1993, Young Artist Award 2007). The artist-curator-educator has picked up long-distance running for this artwork and has run 8 races (including the 2011 London Marathon) since Kaidie's birth, and has spent her entire life of being on the run, too.
Running - literally and figuratively, as both subject matter and methodology – can be a playful way for one to 'run' - navigate, negotiate and transform - one's world. Kaidie/Kai Syng Tan calls this particular way of running 'trans-running'. Being personal, political, playful, philosophical, pungent, phantastical but pertinent and pragmatic – and never pedestrian - trans-running can be a celebration and counterstrike for our 21st century technology-expanded lives. Come run with trans-running, now.
