HORIZONTAL RESISTANCE: RE - FRAMING REST IN SUZHOU, CHINA PUBLIC SPACES

“In late 2021, I arrived in Suzhou, China, where the city lingered in a quiet suspension due to the pandemic. By 2022, as restrictions eased and public life re-emerged, I found myself drawn not to Suzhou’s skyline but to its ground-level gestures—people reclining on benches, asleep on mopeds, or stretched across pavements. These everyday scenes

unsettled my Western assumptions about productivity, propriety, and public space.”This research frames rest as both an aesthetic and political act, reimagining the posture of lying down as a form of resistance. Through performative interventions using a white artist’s canvas in various urban locations around Suzhou Industrial Park, I create a space that isolates and elevates the act of resting. Referencing Duchamp’s readymade and Kaprow’s concepts of blurred lines between art and life, the canvas becomes both a surface and a

threshold —drawing attention to rest as an embodied statement. Informed by theories of affordance and relational art and rooted in China’s lineage of “behavioral art,” tactically reclaiming public space. The project invites reconsidering rest as a shared, critical practice—where art, body, and public space converge.