February 2026 AIR: Taitai x tina
Hello TAITAIxTina! Very excited to have you as an AIR. Your work has a sense of tenacity and resilience. How does durational endurance play a role in your work?
Hi! Thank you for this time to share my work and thoughts! Working for other people as a “movement-based” performer for 12 years from musicals to gallery openings has given me many strategies and perspectives on how durational endurance is used by artists with different goals. With those experiences and my training in contemporary dance, Strongman weightlifting, and Iyenger yoga, I fine tune my expression of the cycles of emotional build up and release that a body goes through when encountering another.
In fitness, there is this idea of training your muscles using “time over tension;” this is the preferred aesthetic in which my installations, photographs, written poetry, and performances take on. The reason for it is to take audiences to a visual extreme of how the body could contort itself, and to question where that pressure comes from. The final form of the artwork itself is also an opportunity for catharsis and contemplation over how heroic acts of self optimization are glorified societally.
As an artist, I struggle with my make-believe and effortful presentations of “a body overcoming” in contemporary society when there is already a huge swath of visual culture showing real inequality and privilege. Because of it, I have been more and more interested in making artwork to involve people’s physical bodies. I want to share with others ways they can find emotional settling through touch and experience that change over time, while not forgetting about the grotesque cruelty of how they were unsettled in the first place. This is another reason why I am thankful for residencies like this one, to empower me with tools and resources for more quiet connections with my viewers, where my physical body is more absent, but the artwork still retains the verve of the tenacious body.
Can you talk about the themes of negotiating freedom in self expression as well as how that relates to conformity and belonging?
When I first started questioning these ideas, I was thinking a lot about how I felt rejected by subsets of contemporary dance culture in my early 20s. I really wanted to have their validation so that I could proudly tell my worried non-dance loved ones that I am a working dancer just like they were working doctors, educators, analysts, entrepreneurs and administrators. Then as I matured a little more and put my body through different kinds of body training because I injured my knee, I saw the ways different fitness cultures also had their chosen customs of movement styles, attire, and body shapes. To be accepted, I had to choose the bare minimum combination of elements to conform to.
Finally, I now see my work situated in the category of “art object” as it is something that I want someone to take time to physically experience without me being present. But as I look around at the artwork of my peers, I see how different my art making looks. I do not make polished collectable objects that tap into someone’s feeling for the sublime. It does not hang nicely onto a wall, rise momentously in the center or draw you in neatly to the corners of the room. I do not profess to say what I am making is more affective, just that it does not look like the rest. That being said, I hold on to my interests about what I do not know, my blindspots, and my inability to work with market or cultural forces that would make my life as an artist more financially stable. Wistfully but with resolve, this is what my current self expression looks like.
What materials have you been experimenting with lately?
Within the movement research I employ, I experiment with ways my physical body can conform to the texture and structure of the objects around it. There is often a lot of somatic comfort to that, even if the visual of me doing that is quite fearful or violent. This is usually the starting point for the other art works I make.
As I express these ideas beyond live performance, I am looking for ways that audiences can engage with their bodies in non-visual ways. Recently, I have been working with contact paper (with a hardwood floor design), polyurethane foam (that has been flayed to show its jagged interior), (peach and lavender scented) paraffin wax, and reversible gold/silver emergency blankets. All these materials retain the memories of being enacted upon by the hand, akin to the skin of the body with its connection to the nervous system, and senses one's changing environments.
When you encounter my work, perhaps the photograph of a virtuosic conventionally beautiful body is ripped apart and retaped together. Maybe a melting pile of paraffin wax is exuding a sensuous yet synthetic aroma. Or even reading through a chapbook of poems printed on soap paper with images of golden emergency blankets, you are enjoying the bath water that the print is melting into.
As you work on your chapbook about repair, tell us more about that project and how it relates to your performances.
I have been a part of a collaborative performance making with Diana Garza Islas, a poet and performer from Nuevo León, Mexico with hard wax, emergency blankets, a metal utility cart, and her writing. Our sharing of ideas mostly happened via digital communications, before our first showing of the performance at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago. Thanks to the Lit and Luz Festival collaboration invitation, we were connected and able to work together this year.
We talked about the hesitation to show a polished “repaired” thing, to honor the dangerous/unsightly nature of the parts that were ruptured to be repaired. As I thought about the presentation and my history of presentations as an artist, I realized I would be back on a proscenium stage. That kind of stage really characterized a lot of my earlier performance work as a dancer; I thought it was important to return to that context of performance with a different approach- to tap into more of other senses simultaneously- the visual, auditory, olfactory, tactile, and proprioception.
Although it ended up not being possible to get a scent wafting in the air as we walked from the back of house to the stage, we were committed to a multisensory presentation.
In regards to this chapbook of poems, I am thinking of ways people can become more tactile with their own bodies during rupture and repair. I have always struggled with the pressure to be professionalized (and thus become more productive within the constructs of political and economic definitions of success) in the various industries I worked in. Choosing to “become professionalized" (if you can even say that) as an artist, which culminated in graduate school three years ago was a big rupture to my sense of worth in society. I have since then felt an urge to repair without forgetting the pain of shattering ways to be in the world that perpetuated hierarchies, exclusivity, and thirst for recognition. None of it was quite linear, and yet they unearthed a lot of buried and newlyfound body sensations that connected me with my value system and intuition.
In this winter residency at Latitude, I want to create a chapbook of poetry about engaging with one’s skin. The skin’s appearance can be an indicator to how one is regulating one’s internal systems. Separate from the Lit and Luz Festival, I have written poetry in the last three years to process the ways I no longer believed in concretizing and solidifying aspects of my life that were still in-process; with it, there is a yearning for understanding through a nonverbal connection to one's emotional states and release from the rigidity of labeling with language. I am excited to learn image transfer techniques at Latitude and combine my film photographs and writing to encourage people to connect with the weight and textures of living in a body. The final “form” of the chapbook will be pieces of soap paper (in which I will have transferred images and written poetry upon) that people can read the poetry on and dissolve in a bath water.
What music, podcasts, rituals, or other things are inspiring you lately?
After going to the Inverse Performance Festival this past December 2025 in Bentonville, AR and attending the Wassy Bats by VL4E workshop, I remembered how much I connected to Latin trap, reggaeton and pop music. I am now doing dives into the earlier works of Bad Bunny, Danny Ocean, Young Miko, and Ivy Queen. There is just something about rhythms and associations of the Spanish language with my childhood/unconscious that invites a groove into my body!
Body ritual wise, besides a very easy baking soda and epsom salt daily bath, I have been sharing the free YouTube resource of “24 Form Tai Chi Demonstration Back View Master Amin Wu” to anyone who is interested. It is a great 6 minute follow along video of movements that one can move through, to attenuate more to one’s respiratory, circulation, muscular, and skeletal bodies. Finally, I definitely do not want to minimize the importance of skincare rituals during these blistering winter days. I treat lotion as an armor against external and internal feelings of dullness and lack of inspiration.