Derealized April, 2025 & May 2025
This performance was a personal exploration of derealization— the unsettling feeling of unreality in everyday life, and the distorted perception of time, space, and self. Inspired by a surreal state of mind, I created my unique outfit with only two holes and decorated it with mirrors and beads.
The act of stepping into this unique outfit — letting it swallow me, hide me, and shape me — became a symbolic ritual of becoming unseen, disconnected, and yet oddly present. The ocean and the cold wind amplified the surreal mood. Although the final video is only four minutes long, the full experience from waking up at 5 a.m. to returning home at 9 a.m. felt like a dream. When I lay back in bed, it was the usual time I would be waking up. The contrast between these timelines gave me a lived experience of time-bending, as if I had stepped into an alternate layer of reality.
When preparing this performance, I drew inspiration from surrealism, as well as the philosopher Heidegger’s notion of Being-in-the-world. This performance was not a detached observation of dissociation — it was an immersion. I didn’t perform “about” unreality; I was unreality. My body, the cold, the outfit, the ocean — all of these were not separate elements but part of my thrownness into the world.
Invited by Amsterdam Alternative, I performed at the Amsterdam750 op de ring festival with a fabric installation I had created for it, continuing my exploration of derealization.
Corns & Chicken August, 2025
This performance was inspired by the food culture and marketplace traditions in China. In my home country, the proportion of vegetarians is very low, and throughout my childhood I often accompanied my grandmother to the local wet market. Scenes of peeling corn and slaughtering live chickens left a lasting impression on me. The act of killing and plucking a chicken is both bloody and visceral, yet for farmers and my grandmother’s generation, it was simply part of everyday life.
In this performance, I invited my grandmother to peel corn and pluck chicken feathers. These gestures are strikingly similar in form, but when enacted on vegetables versus animals, they create profoundly different perceptions and meanings. By juxtaposing the two, the work exposes the hidden processes behind food preparation and highlights the contrast in how we perceive “vegetables” and “meat.”
For my grandmother, these actions remain ordinary and instinctive routines. For me—as the initiator, documenter, and viewer—the cruelty of slaughter is difficult to accept. For the audience, witnessing this performance may force a confrontation with the realities usually concealed by the food industry and consumer culture, prompting them to reconsider their eating habits and the sanitized, neatly packaged produce and meat found in supermarkets.
Seesaw Dining June, 2025
- A conceptual dining ritual
This specially designed seesaw table reveals the invisible tensions of shared meals—hesitation, rhythm, and balance. Two participants sit opposite each other, eating simple food in nature. Thoughts like "Am I eating too fast?" or "Should I wait for them?" become audible. The experience redefines our relationship with food, the act of eating, and the person we share the moment with.
Inspired by Cioran’s On the Heights of Despair (Sur les cimes du désespoir), Meditations on Absurdity begins with questions sharp enough to cut through certainty. From the most rational brink I could reach, I turned to the absurd — to critique, to imagine, to remember. Nineteen years old, I wrote of the fragile pacts we make with our surroundings, with each other, with ourselves. This is not an answer, but a beginning.
Meditations on Absurdity
Dolly Qianyu Wu June, 2025Necessary Reflections
Our thoughts are bitter as seawater. Yet we must think. When we
realize a voice exists within our minds—that we can converse with
ourselves—the world transforms. We don’t remember when this
began. Every minute, a thousand thoughts flicker through our
minds. Sometimes we forget their sound (they are not words, but
sounds). Yet we relish it. Only in dreamless sleep or death does
everything cease abruptly, returning to silence. We revert to an
authentic state with the world: a duality where only "I" and "the
world" remain, voiceless.
In a higher dimension, thought is the primary form; flesh becomes
unnecessary. There, we exist as pure consciousness—no sound,
no vibrations of three-dimensional gases. Would communication
there resemble our silent inner dialogues? Metaphysical
manifestations are as intricate and elusive as existence itself.
Eventually, we attribute it all to absurdity.
But is absurdity not the essence of eternity? All our expressions—
superficial, profound, perfunctory, undeniable, incomprehensible—
are merely ways to prove we exist. Yet it feels like a closed loop.
Why must we prove? Why must we exist? Only after enduring
suffering, sorrow, doubt, existential questioning, and experiencing
love and happiness, can we grasp over time: we exist for the
supreme experience of love and beauty, where an instant becomes
eternity. Within existence, time is insignificant—all that is long is
short, all that is vast is small. Thus we begin to sense details,
essence, and the present.
As one among many, I no longer stand as a detached observer to
scrutinize and criticize myself. At times, I begin to love the
connections between myself and others, animals, and nature.
When inner strength merges with the energy field, I breathe in the
profound sense of meaning that bursts forth.
Our thoughts are bitter as seawater. Yet we must think. When we
realize a voice exists within our minds—that we can converse with
ourselves—the world transforms. We don’t remember when this
began. Every minute, a thousand thoughts flicker through our
minds. Sometimes we forget their sound (they are not words, but
sounds). Yet we relish it. Only in dreamless sleep or death does
everything cease abruptly, returning to silence. We revert to an
authentic state with the world: a duality where only "I" and "the
world" remain, voiceless.
In a higher dimension, thought is the primary form; flesh becomes
unnecessary. There, we exist as pure consciousness—no sound,
no vibrations of three-dimensional gases. Would communication
there resemble our silent inner dialogues? Metaphysical
manifestations are as intricate and elusive as existence itself.
Eventually, we attribute it all to absurdity.
But is absurdity not the essence of eternity? All our expressions—
superficial, profound, perfunctory, undeniable, incomprehensible—
are merely ways to prove we exist. Yet it feels like a closed loop.
Why must we prove? Why must we exist? Only after enduring
suffering, sorrow, doubt, existential questioning, and experiencing
love and happiness, can we grasp over time: we exist for the
supreme experience of love and beauty, where an instant becomes
eternity. Within existence, time is insignificant—all that is long is
short, all that is vast is small. Thus we begin to sense details,
essence, and the present.
As one among many, I no longer stand as a detached observer to
scrutinize and criticize myself. At times, I begin to love the
connections between myself and others, animals, and nature.
When inner strength merges with the energy field, I breathe in the
profound sense of meaning that bursts forth.
I awaken from dreamless sleep as if reborn after death. It’s 9:30
PM. Jazz from the sixties still plays from the laptop on my desk.
Before bed, I read Cioran. Reading philosophy easily drives those
already skeptical of the world to madness—I am one. Not madness
in the mundane sense—I need no asylum. One night a month ago,
everything felt quantifiable: the white dashed lines on the road,
bricks on the wall, tree bark. I recalled the pistachios I’d eaten
earlier—whole ones, split ones. Some cracked open under my
fingers, their white shells splitting in two, seeming both countable
and infinite.
Yet I grow increasingly joyless—a periodic unhappiness. I begin to
understand slumber, understand those who overdose on sleeping
pills (though I differ from them). I understand life’s brevity and
death’s inevitability; I will not intervene. But the past me couldn’t
grasp the meaning of sleep—my thoughts were then at a
controllable threshold. Sometimes they’d plummet or circle, yet
always pulled back by external forces into the fold of "normal"
people.
By origin, we are not free. We had no right to choose birth, family,
or background. All freedoms are built and weighed upon existing
conditions. We cannot freely choose joy or pain; our minds and
bodies are bound by environment. Idealists claim heaven or hell lies
within, yet the mind is trapped in flesh, and flesh trapped in
circumstance. Our conscious freedom and imagination cannot
transcend cognition. Most crave ultimate freedom, but freedom is
momentary, fleeting, relative. If our consciousness drifted in another
dimension, perhaps we’d cease pursuing this abstract concept.
Everything is abstract; concrete limitations vanish.
The necessity of writing carries a pessimistic hue for me. Thoughts
no longer drift lightly in my mind—they sink and churn with
heaviness. This perpetual sinking and churning stirs unrest within
me. Each idea exists in a state of simultaneous birth and
suffocation. Thoughts demand release—vomiting all illusions and
realities indiscriminately onto paper. Only then can my brain
function like a normal organ, weary and settled, craving the instinct
of sleep.
Night of May 15, 2025. I turn off all lights, lock my door, throw waste
paper into the bin. Like countless yesterdays, I fall into a coma of
writing and sleep at 2 AM.
“ If we were unconscious about death, how would life differ?”
-Unconscious State
Publishing collaboration or interested in learning about the full book
Please email dollyqianyuwu@gmail.com
Graphics
Poetic Sunset Between the Five Senses May 2023
Media: film, white cardboard
Size: 20×14.5 cm
Statement:
Revolving "sunset" as a specific context, I invited respondents to experience the natural phenomenon through their five senses and give descriptions of their feelings. Also, with the form of a transparent booklet, I made the final images that demonstrated the overlapping effects of senses, proving the theory that "Feelings are not an instant development but a result of overlapping perception from the five senses."
Based on the interplay of people and environments, I conducted a logical analysis of the deep connotations and presented a poetic visualization of the sunset from an artistic perspective.
Hey, That’s Me October 2023
Media: Photoshop, Procreate
Size: 42×29.7 cm
Statement:
Since childhood, I've been able to swiftly transition between static and dynamic states. Soccer, basketball, skateboarding, and other sports present the dynamic me; drawing, reading, and writing demonstrate my static side. My complete self seems to consist of the two opposite parts, but they are also complementary, both indispensable. In my growth, they continuously offer me steady strength and warmth.