Date of Award
Summer 5-22-2026
Document Type
Thesis
Degree Name
Master of Fine Arts (MFA)
Department
Photography
First Advisor
Laine Rettmer
Second Advisor
Shura Baryshnikov
Third Advisor
Dr. Julia Barber
Abstract
In embodied practice, the artist’s experience and body become the medium through which thought and expression take form, not as illustration, but as primary material. Performance art has long occupied an unstable position within contemporary art: celebrated in retrospect, underfunded in practice, and selectively institutionalized. Its marginality has never been evenly distributed. Certain bodies, female, racialized, aging, non-normative, have remained further outside the archive than others, their work harder to collect, harder to value, and easier to forget. To work in performance, particularly as a woman, is to work within that contradiction.
For me, performance is less a form than a conversation between the body and time. My body moves through the fragmented flow of time, rising and falling. Performance work cannot fully reveal its depth through video, text, or image alone, but the process of showing that work and shaping it into a concept has been the most significant thing I have taken from these two years of my MFA study journey.
As a female artist, I find that the conditions of our inner lives tend to push embodied practice further than we expect. The body is my first language and also the place I have most consistently ignored. As I grow older, the pressures of time on the body have become impossible to look away from, whether from within the family or from the outside world’s expectations of women in midlife. The urgency is no longer abstract.
When I began asking where that pressure comes from, the work came with it.
Recommended Citation
zhang, wen, "The body has its own time" (2026). Masters Theses. 1688.
https://digitalcommons.risd.edu/masterstheses/1688
Creative Commons License
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Included in
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