We remember watching Jeff Chen‘s 2015 staging of Kuo Pao Kun’s Descendants of the Eunuch Admiral – a play about China’s 15th century legendary eunuch and maritime explorer, Admiral Zheng He. Using the metaphor of castration, parallels are drawn between the power struggles of court eunuchs and the displacement of modern beings who make sacrifices in their lives to survive in highly competitive societies.
Back then, in an interview with the Straits Times, Jeff said “I’m quite anxious about doing this piece. Because in our theatre community, when you ask a lot of practitioners which of Pao Kun’s texts they love the most – it would be Descendants.”
In that same article by Corrie Tan, we are told that the “lyrical, episodic play is an open invitation of sorts to directors, written in 16 parts with no characters or stage directions indicated, and entirely in prose and verse.”
Perhaps it’s fitting then that contemporary artists have now taken up the mantle in starch’s Inheritance of Parts.
What did we remember about the 2015 play? Well there was so much painful squeezing, squealing, chopping, thwacking and thumping that we had to leave halfway— not because it was a performance but because it was so incredibly uncomfortably good.
The artists at starch do not let the side down with a dizzying array of works inspired by the play. There are phallic, organic shapes in jars. Some are bouncing while attached to cords, others are dismembered and melting and laid around the space.
Yet more are wrapped around the handles of knives and cleavers.
Chairs are cut, and so are mirrors, and there’s a hollow gamelan which looks like a boat with wire and razor blade-like musical sails.
Marine signals shoot up through the gallery space casting the most beautiful shadows across the space.
At one point during Sunday’s artist activation, fires were lit and haunting Javanese songs were sung operatically in different levels in the gallery space.
It was such a great display by some very exciting artists — Moses Tan, Irfan Kasban, Rosemainy Buang, Li Yan Loong, Zachary Chan and Marcia Ong. The show runs till 7 Nov and artist activations will be taking place during the closing weekend as well.
Make time for it, and talk to the artists if you can. There is no wall text here but a multitude of meanings behind their materials, processes and ideas about the legend of Zheng He!
