Hive Center for Contemporary Art is delighted to present ‘Leaking Frontier’, the first show of 2025 at Hive Becoming, opening on 14 March 2025, featuring the latest sculptures and installations by Hong Kong and London-based artist Man Mei-To. In collaboration with dancers and performance artists Jamal Sterrett, Woo Yat-Hei, Ching Chu, and Jenny Yau, this series of works captures the bodies present in various fleeting moments. These stillnesses, created in the history of things, spaces, movements, and narratives, imply an escape in consciousness from imagination and interpretation of the body, an autonomous boundary established by the fragments of time that interrupt the subject. This exhibition is curated by Tang Yifei, and will be on view through 15 April.

The Chinese exhibition title translated to ‘this body is like lightning, barely lasting from moment to moment’ derives from the Vimalakirti Sutra, signifying that the body of things – the material entity – is always in flux and emerges in an endless profusion. Man’s creative process begins with a bodily site, where the artist and the dancer engage in a dialogue in the dedicated space, in which the dancer’s specific movements to promptly respond and explore become the present tense of such flux. In the simultaneous presence of emergence and dissipation, when movements are executed, boundaries are also established. Sometimes the body presents a direct answer; sometimes it is accompanied by language; sometimes the scale of the body mediates the limits of the inexplicable, and the body serves as a radar for detecting perception, a vessel for representation. As Man documents and scans these postures, the rarefication and delay from the electronic devices introduce these flux to a context of observation, when particles of time are arranged over the body, and potentially dislocated connections, mutilated parts, recurring ends, and ruptured edges reassemble to form a new body. Man arranges, captures, grafts, and grows these electronic, cyber bodies in the screen, dissolving previous boundaries, transforming and synthesising them into new formations. However, they no longer appear as suspiciously moulded bodies, returning to organic wooden sculptures with natural texture. Combining the veins and scars of the wood, in response to the skeletal structure, joints, and meridians of the torso, Man sculpts out the details and endings, applying subtle layers of paint, while the surface of the skin is sometimes concealed, and at other times revealing the original tone of the wood. Like some critical moments of the body – the bulging veins when exerting force, and the everting joints during stretching – transform the imperceptible internal reactions and the stimulation of the nerve endings into a shiver of perceptible empathy.

Understanding and imagining the body as a micro-mechanism of social and cultural construction is, at the same time, relevant to the individual’s political emotional expression. The dancers’ bodies are trained bodies, where the temporality and history of movement serve as an archive and re-enactment of bodily memories, enduring physical and mental disciplines and aesthetic ideologies. And when the movement is removed from the complete event, the significance it contains creates tension and becomes an anti-structural ritual – fragility, bruises, distortion, and pain, etc., become the symbols of the flux of life, and instead expands a poetic potential for imagination and possibilities, like the twisting of a harp or the shouts of a bouquet of shedding flowers… On a physical level, these chaos and order, brutality and elegance, external dissonance and internal transcendence consume each other to reveal themselves more honestly to the world. As Yvonne Rainer summarised, ‘the mind is a muscle’, the scale and tension of the body not only embody but also practice and shape ideas. The flux of these perceptions and knowledge, the construction of significance, and power relations delineate the space where consciousness is dislocated from the body, or where the body acts in advance of consciousness.