Set Your Teeth on Edge

There is more wisdom in your body than in your deepest philosophy. -Friedrich Nietzsche

Irving wears dress from SIRLOIN

Irving Cheung, Art Director, Costume Designer, Artist

Nominated for Best Art Direction at Hong Kong Film Awards in 2013 for “Rigor Mortis”, and this year for “The Empty Hands”.

What's your favourite Chinese idiom related to body & sensation?

如芒刺背 (prickle on the back) - means being anxious. Rather than pain, what I suffer most from is the spiral disorder since I was 11 years old, as well as undergoing three spinal fusion surgeries. I constantly feel itchiness under my skin that is impossible to scratch, resulting from mismatch of my sensory nerves. So for my MA degree project I’ve made an “Itchy Dress” by attaching markers on my fingers and scratch whenever I felt itchy; the dress was a body map of my day-to-day inexpressible discomforts.

How is body sensation has influence on your filmmaking work?

My complex body sensation leads me to understand that these type of hinges create who you are. I would try to live like the characters to understand how they function. I often try to visualize the state of mind of the person with different setting of everyday objects. In my work, there are often a mixture of abandoned objects like useless cable, dead flowers, empty bottles, broken chairs, all sitting quietly next to each other in their own rhythm. When surrounded by these objects, the character somehow sinks into it and becomes part of the set.

Your work often involves reinterpreting traditions. What traditions have influenced on you?

I spent my teenage life in Northern Ireland before I went to London for University. The boarding school I lived in was over 100 years old, I didn’t think it was so special, until I was back in extremely modernised Hong Kong. I miss every detail of the old times. I like the texture of the old walls, the rusty Chinese signs, that you could still find in the lively environment of Hong Kong.

Bobby wears bra, brief, boxer & socks from SIRLOIN

Bobby Shuk Pui Yu, Multi-disciplinary Artist

Awarded for the Best Actress at the 2014 Golden Sugarcane Film Festival in Taiwan, for her performance in “Room 12”.

What's your favorite Chinese idiom related to body & sensation?

體無完膚(injured all over the body) - often used figuratively for damages inflicted by verbal attacks. I had a big fight with my lover, my destructive words came out unconsciously and were like blades cutting through his skins.

Your works involve your own body or whose of the participants. How do body sensations influence your work?

My art is ambiguous; the direction is not always clear and can fluctuate. Often, my mentality changes the status quo through creation, however, creating more problems and making the situation more confusing. Every time I make love, I often tell to my partner: "I'm sorry, my vagina is too complicated and not turned on yet." This is exactly the same as with art. To achieve the central idea of works through the control and non-control of the body's emotions and desires can ultimately depend on the body's feelings for what can and cannot be done. I’ve become more obsessed with the authenticity, perhaps artistic creation is the constant pursuit of the freedom of uncertainty. This is not an avoidance of real life. Instead, it is a more positive attitude and behavior with the intention of seeking freedom in creation.

Kidney wears blouse & brief from MOTO GUO, with few of his most favorite pieces from his toy collection. Including, necklace DIY with a Energy Lock Seed from Japanese television series Kamen Rider Gaim, dumpling monster by Japanese toy artist Satoru Doki of Yamomark, Fuku Bear from Hong Kong-based Sofubi brand Don’t Cry In The Morning, and a buckle from Japanese television series Ressha Sentai ToQger (Left). Kidney wears jacket from SANKUANZ (Right).

Kidney CHUNG Social Phenomenon, Self-proclaimed “Internet Brother”

(Cantonese internet slang, an amiable way to address male user on forums)

Kidney creates visuals, T-shirts, pins & zines, filled with local Hong Kong elements. In his zine “The Monster City”, Kidney compares Momzilla, and Hongkongers who are encumbered by job & mortgage and all kinds of social pressures, with the monstrous creatures in the classic Chinese mythology “Shan Hai Jing” (Classic of Mountains and Seas). Kidney also collects art toys with bizarre characteristics, and wishes to create his toy design one day.

What's your favourite Chinese idiom related to body & sensation?

未學行先學走 (run before one can walk) - many people think that in order to start working on something, you have to first learn and become an expert. I think “walk before you can run” limits your ways of thinking.

What kind of creative would you like to be?

I want to speak with my work and not only through social platforms, to be persistent, producing the best quality with the least cost and implications and to do something related to my local culture.

Jayers wears gloves from SHUSHU/TONG

Jayers KO Tattoo Artist, Writer

JAYERS KO studied psychology at university, and is the author of “A Book About The Tattooed People In Hong Kong”.

What's your favourite Chinese idiom related to body & sensation?

血脈相連 (tied with blood and veins). Tattooing is a huge part of my life, not only does the visuals inspire me greatly, but the history, the spirit and of course the human interaction within this art form. I’ve always felt that I'm connected with the rest of the world, but with tattooing it's even more obvious. From the people who did tattoos thousands of years ago, and to those who I’m tattooing now. The second word in the idiom “脈” means veins, is pronounced the same way as “ink “墨” in Cantonese, so it also sounds like blood & ink are tied together, which describes how I feel of being in this family or even religion of tattoo.

What’s your most memorable experience story about tattoo?

A lower leg sleeve filled with 20 different kinds of vegetables on a chef. Obviously he's very passionate about his job just like myself. We became very good friends.

What do you love most about Hong Kong & Sham Shui Po, where your studio is located?

I love Hong Kong for its insane combination of the old and the new, the intense concrete jungle right next to a good hike in the nature, the mix of Western and Eastern culture. I have my studio at Sham Shui Po, because it is still one of the very few non-overdeveloped, super local old parts of the city.

Jason wears pants from PRONOUNCE & tank top of his own.

Jason MUI, Designer

Jason grew up in Birmingham, and moved to Hong Kong in 2010. In 2015, Jason and On-Ying LAI launched their own brand Yat Pit, (which means ‘one stroke’ or 'first start' in Cantonese.) The eccentric and visionary label began with a loose sense of the "lost Chinese-ness" that ended up at the core of the brand. Yat Pit’s designs are nostalgic with modern, androgynous twist; their first collection was photographed by the late Ren Hang. Rapper YoungQueenz made a song titled “Yat Pit” and had the MV shot at their studio.

What's your favourite Chinese idiom related to body & sensation?

身體力行 (practice what one preaches). I like to think of myself as very mindful, aware and awake. I’m very in tune with my own being and why I exist in this world. Everything I do is the puzzle pieces to my journey and my growth. How you carry your body shows what your mindset is. Yukio Mishima and Bruce Lee speaks a lot to me, their philosophy, art, and journey of creation; what I am doing is similar. Their bodies also refer to what to they preached. Be it karate or martial art, every muscle of them speaks what they are thinking.

What would you like to do with Yat Pit?

As a creative of this generation, we have a different elements and platforms to reach out to lots of people. Yat Pit is a language, a voice, a platform, speaking to the world, to look at Hong Kong in a different sense to China. We wish to preserve the cultures of Hong Kong. To make Chinese clothing relevant to nowadays life. Chinese clothing isn’t a trend. It can be merged into everyone’s wardrobe, becoming your daily wear, your suit, denim and t-shirt.

What do you like most about Hong Kong & Sham Shui Po where your home and studio are?

I like Hong Kong for the carelessness and that very unusual energy. It took me a long time to understand this catastrophic environment, you have to be with a certain kind of mindset and vision to spot and find the good things among all the chaos and craziness. The distracting environment of Hong Kong makes me more alter to things that I like.

Sham Shui Po presents a little bit of my personality. It’s madness but there is a realness to that place. It’s not fake.

It’s dirty.

It’s clean.

It’s rich.

It’s poor.

It’s loud.

It’s quiet.

I fall in love with it everyday. For me, it’s the perfect Yin and Yang of places to thrive as a creative person.

Culture

The Club Is Coming to the Stage

We enter and make our way to what is approximately front left of the DJ booth, where we’re accustomed to dancing at clubs in New York. “So is this a techno club or a dance performance?” yells an uncertain participant in my boyfriend’s ear. He laughs, bouncing along to Ben UFO, and yells back, “It’s both!” The club has long been a hot topic in European contemporary dance but it is only now making its way into New York performance venues, largely through transatlantic tours. R.O.S.E. follows recent examples like Michele Rizzo’s HIGHER xtn. at MoMA PS1 (May 2024), (LA)HORDE’s Room with a View at NYU Skirball (October 2023), and Gisèle Vienne’s Crowd at BAM (October 2022).

Do these performances compromise the club’s spirit — a space idealized for its anonymity, dark lighting, and thundering music? The notion of the club as a utopian escape is admittedly just that — an ideal — because of how its intense conditions can create barriers to entry. Still, the club remains sacred for many, a place to forge connections and embrace an alternative state of being. Looking at how performances transfer this spirit to new settings reveals what aspects of the club are essential and those that aren’t.

Sharon Eyal, R.O.S.E. 2024. Photography by Stephanie Berger, courtesy of Park Avenue Armory.

Eyal’s dancers make their entrance. The lighting shifts from roving blue to yellow spotlights as Ben UFO’s tracks transition to more melodic beats. Clad in deconstructed lace Dior lingerie with dark red tears painted on their faces, the dancers move cautiously in a tightly maintained pack, slicing paths through the horde with hoof-like steps and jerky leg extensions. After around ten minutes of this controlled choreography, the dancers vanish as the lighting shifts back to blue and Ben UFO picks up his dubby beats. The club, as we knew it, resumes. This cycle of tightly executed movements and free-flowing club-goers repeats several times, each time emboldening the dancers to plunge further into the crowd.

Clubbing in a building once built for the U.S. Army National Guard on Manhattan’s Upper East Side turns out to be surprisingly successful — at least for the audience. What starts as an awkward, scattered group searching for their non existent seats gradually gels into an engaged, bouncing crowd that erupts in cheers each time the dancers enter and exit. Performance patrons who might never step foot in a club find themselves swept up in its potential for communion, moving in unison with fellow ticket holders. But it isn’t until the very end of R.O.S.E. that the dancers finally break free from Eyal’s choreography and join the fired-up audience in a brief moment of improvisatory movement with the music. By keeping her dancers at arm’s length, Eyal seems more interested in the club as a backdrop for her signature movement style than wholly as a space with meaningful stories to be told.

Michele Rizzo, HIGHER xtn. 2024. Photography by Cameron Kelly courtesy of MoMA PS1.

Back in May, I attended Wire Festival, a multiday electronic music event at Knockdown Center that had no shortage of organically united dancefloors. It attracted a crowd of seasoned ravers who were eager to celebrate the start of spring as they danced alongside DJs who played well into the daylight. I left Wire in an afternoon daze to see Michele Rizzo’s HIGHER xtn. at MoMA PS1. My sleepless euphoria only deepened as the performance unfolded, starting with a lone dancer who looked plucked out of the festival.

The dancer, dressed in sneakers, baggy jeans, and a tight tank top, shuffled slowly into the gallery, perfectly in sync with the looping bars of an understated electronic melody. Soon, other dancers, clad in the same staple rave uniform, joined him — each having traveled from Europe for the U.S. museum debut of HIGHER xtn., which premiered at the Stedelijk in Amsterdam in 2018 and quickly became a fixture at kunsthalles and festivals across the continent. As the score’s tempo climbed, the choreography locked into a 16-count sequence, which the dancers executed with precise synchrony. They remained intensely focused, never making eye contact with each other, as they sought release in the endless repetition of synthesized beats. Once the dancers reached their limit, they stopped the sequence and exited the gallery, one by one.

HIGHER xtn. used the focused daylight of the gallery to highlight the meditative release found in the repetitive movements that dominate dark dancefloors. The performance’s restraint brought more consistency and intentionality than Eyal’s all-encompassing club construction in R.O.S.E. Yet both performances offer enticing entry points into club culture for those who may not frequent raves. Rizzo’s ecstatic, hypnotic repetitions reveal how the club can mirror other meditative practices, while Eyal’s interpolation of performance and clubbing helped hesitant audience members blossom by the end. Still, both works overlook one of the most underappreciated aspects of clubbing — its potential for individual expression. HIGHER xtn.’s pristine uniformity especially risks promoting the outdated techno trope that there’s a “right” way to dance to electronic music.

Maybe this shortcoming is, in fact, a benefit. For habitual ravers jaded by one too many sunrise sets, it’s a reminder to return to the club with more intention. If you pause and peer through the darkness, you’ll see hundreds of people moving to the same beat, each with their own subtle variations. This collective choreography is a ready-made spectacle that doesn’t need validation in a theater or museum. And when the music shifts slightly, you can watch the ripple effect sweep through the crowd while feeling the new beat in your body. Maybe this small bit of magic is best left on the dance floor.

Culture

Real Slick, Jack: Psyche Organic Arrives in New York

Shop Psyche Organic at Happier Grocery and Dimes. Coming soon to @citarellagourmetmarket @unionmarket @gourmetgarage @deciccos @fairwaymarket plus many more.

Culture

Porsche SCOPES Brings Art, Music, and Design to Toronto

The festival was a full immersion into Toronto’s dynamic creative energy. Day one set the tone with DJ collective Living Room, followed by an experimental performance by Claire Rousay that captivated the crowd. Jewelry designer Steff Eleoff unveiled her Porsche Taycan 4S art car installation—a bold fusion of automotive and wearable art inspired by her Sedona ring—while OVO Sound’s Naomi Sharon and DVSN wrapped up the night with powerful, genre-defying performances.

We witnessed SCOPES Toronto bridging underground and mainstream with day two’s lineup. DJ Korea Town Acid’s set paved the way for Angelphroot and Dameer’s debut of BASSMATI, a track blending South Asian influences with bass-driven sounds. Chippy Nonstop’s return to Toronto and Richie Hawtin’s extended set were milestones of the evening, proving that the city’s underground scene has a global resonance.

The final day featured standout performances from local pianist Harrison, Indigenous artist Tia Wood, and hip-hop visionary Sean Leon, who elevated his set with a live choir. Moonshine Collective’s film and musical performance explored themes of African utopia, showcasing art’s power to bridge culture and technology. Rising Toronto star SadBoi, who paused her tour to perform at SCOPES, further underscored the festival’s commitment to nurturing local talent.

Throughout the weekend, we experienced installations from artists like Mitsu Mitsu and culinary creations from Bar Mordecai, capturing the multifaceted creativity Porsche SCOPES brought to Toronto. This milestone 10th edition, open to all, allowed Toronto’s vibrant arts scene to thrive, underscoring SCOPES’ mission to celebrate local talent while connecting it to a global audience.

office had the chance to connect with rising star SadBoi ahead of the event. In our conversation, she shared insights into her creative journey and reflected on what performing and growing up in Toronto means to her and her work.

How are you, and where are you at right now? You told me you were traveling.

Um, I’m good, I’m feeling really good right now. I’m traveling back to Salt Lake City. I had a show yesterday in Seattle. I’m on tour right now with Coco and Claire.

How is touring life treating you? Do you like it?

I love being on the road. To be honest, I feel like I don’t know—like I’ve had good experiences and bad ones—but this time it’s really fun, especially with the people I’m surrounded by. It’s also the longest tour I’ve been on; I have about four more weeks to go. I’m trying not to think about how many days I have left.

Do you feel homesick?

Yes, because when I start thinking about how many days are left, I start to miss my dogs. I’ve just been trying to stay in the moment—I don’t even know what day of the week it is, to be honest with you.

Oh, sweet! What are your dogs’ names?

Jillian and Winston. I know, they’re crazy names.

You’ll be performing at SCOPES in Toronto, which is where you grew up. Do you feel like the crowd is different when you perform in Toronto compared to other cities?

Yes, I mean, Toronto just feels different because it’s home. Every time I come back to perform, something in my career has changed. The last time I performed in Toronto, people just wanted to have a good time, and I’m excited to perform back home again to see everyone’s reactions. I know it’s going to be different from the last time. It’s exciting to see your own growth. Toronto is a tough crowd, though. If we’re with you, we’re really with you.

So, they’re super picky? You have to gain their respect, or what is it?

I think Toronto people are in their own world, but when something really connects with them, they’ll lose themselves in the moment. But it takes something to bring them out of that. Toronto crowds are tough because even if they like you, they won’t show it outright until they’re really vibing with you.

It’s like a vibe check, right?

Exactly. They’ll enjoy your performance, but it’s hard to explain. When people visit Toronto, they often say, “Oh, you guys are so nice,” and I’m like, “I don’t think we’re that nice, we’re just polite.” Like, you can walk down the street, and no one will say anything, but it’s just our mannerisms.

You mentioned Toronto can have a moody energy, especially at night, and that the underground night scene there really inspires you. Can you talk more about what makes Toronto's nightlife so influential for you?

Absolutely, Toronto has this unique energy that comes alive at night. Similar to New York, there are the popular clubs everyone knows, but you need to find your niche—the people who know where the real parties are. I remember going to raves in high school yards, sneaking in because I wasn’t old enough. Events like Baby, Jerk!, and Yes Yes Y’all were pivotal, exposing me to DJs blending dancehall with EDM—something I hadn’t seen before. Toronto nightlife is moody and intense, but when everyone’s out, it’s like the whole city is alive.