Direct/camera/edit: Michiyasu Furutani
dramaturge: Dandan Liu
Curation & Organisation: Ming Poon & Frederika Tsai

9/May, 27/May/2021 AsianPerformingArtists Lab(APAL) 2, Performing Arts Festival Berlin2021

This research project developed in APAL (Asian Performing Artists Lab) originally intended to complement an exploration, as a performative art, of the intersection of East Asian patriarchal social structures based on Confucianism and the context of colonialism in Egypt and South Africa to examine the impact of social norms on the body and its environment. However, affected by a physically restricted circumstance, “a borrowed field” was forced to manage the research subject as highly abstract and a volatile theme. Ultimately, the project turned into a movie work consisting of movements found in a forest of Saxony-Anhalt.
The name “borrowed field” is borrowed from one of the notions of the East Asian garden technique “borrowed scenery(借景)”, that is, incorporating elements of a distant landscape into a garden setting. With this principle, the movie explores looking for a mark of a human being in nature as touching the exposure of human invasion. Also, borrowing a perspective of Confucianism that remains in East Asian societies in the form of honorific usage, bowing greeting, and positioning in public spaces as a linguistic and spatial classification/domination, this movie examines a distance between nature and human beings for the present and future.