Paeonia Drive is a project that deals with the effects of meditation—on the cultural, the ecological, and the social—rotating around a core conceptual axis of “the garden”.

While there is no garden immediately visible—plants, dirt and flowers have been replaced with screens, mirrors and filters—it is the actions and techniques of gardening that are present in Paeonia Drive, as modes of navigation, simulation, and control.

The artists utilise the techniques of gardening to produce patterns—of movements, space, bodies, images—in order to produce perspectives, bringing into view the fact that what one can see depends on where one stands, or to extend this notion further, what one has access to depends on one’s position.

Both gardens and algorithms operate through “pathways” that predetermine positions and behaviours. Outside these pathways lie other possibilities.

Paeonia Drive is a site of simulation, echo, filter and reflection. Images do not arrive directly but rather through stacked interfaces that bring into question the relationship between the physical space of the body and the simulated space of the image. Audiences encounter themselves and each other through recursive mirrored reflections and delayed live feeds, their image multiplied across the space. Paeonia Drive investigates the relationship between seeing and being seen, and the effect on “performance” that emerges within this entanglement.

Paeonia Drive utilises the time based mediums of its artists—choreography and cinema—to produce images and movement, as well as the movement of images, through their circulation both inside and beyond the frame of Paeonia Drive.

Paeonia Drive is a project which culminates in performance installations that take on variations specific to the place and site in which they are staged. In addition, the artists upkeep this 360 degree website as an archive of the project’s digital materials, rehearsal fragments, and research nodes.

Su Yu Hsin & Angela Goh