Invoking the past (and future) of T’ai Chi

On the first Saturday in May, a group of concerned citizens was gathered in the Southwest Waterfront Artist in Residence (AiR) studio, asking questions and looking worried about the implications of what they were about to do.

“T’ai Chi is vast,” said David Vanadia, their instructor. “You can’t just go to one movie and say, well, I experienced cinema.” Horatio Law, the artist organizing the workshop, added, “There’s a philosophy component to it.”

Though inexperienced in the art of T’ai Chi, members of the Southwest Waterfront community, and anyone else who wants to join in, will be part of a mammoth group doing T’ai Chi in the park at the end of the month. In preparing for T’ai Chi for 1,000, the culmination of Law’s guest residency at the waterfront AiR studio, Law is asking people to be willing to learn, and do, something they are not completely sure of.

It’s all for the sake of togetherness.

A varied and ancient art, T’ai Chi is generally a solo practice that, while rooted in self-defense motions, is also a meditation that focuses the mind and a physical activity that improves the practitioner’s health.

People practice T’ai Chi for a variety of reasons, Law said, “self-defense, health reasons, but also community.”

But why is he including it in his participatory art project?

“It’s very democratic, very egalitarian…. It might look kind of odd,” Law said, “but it’s very relaxing, it’s very graceful, and it’s really good exercise.”

Law explained that anywhere Chinese people live, you might see T’ai Chi being practiced in the park. Americans are familiar with the image of groups of Chinese dancing or practicing a coordinated step routine outdoors in a public space, and those routines are rooted in the idea of T’ai Chi as a meditation and exercise.

The T’ai Chi demonstration itself is only one part of Law’s plans for his month-long guest residency, called China-On-Willamette. In the two other components of the project, Law will place small, changeable sculptures in various locations around the waterfront neighborhood.

The first, which has to do with fortification, is a bamboo wall, which Law will arrange in the shape of a pentagon and other shapes, with the intent of playing with people’s (often faulty) belief in security.

The second component, which questions how people feed their community by changing the natural environment, utilizes several green chopsticks, imagery that invokes the terraced rice fields prevalent in much of Asia, as well as the backyard farms that Chinese people once cultivated in the hills above downtown Portland.

In the late 1800s Portland had “the second biggest Chinatown in the U.S., outside of San Francisco,” Law said. “Many didn’t stay because they weren’t allowed to be citizens until the ’60s. Laborers weren’t allowed to bring their spouses, so children were very precious in Chinatown.”

Not even allowed to walk aboveground after dark, Chinese communities built a series of underground tunnels to get from one place to another and carry on business after dark.

Since the Southwest Waterfront is a brand new neighborhood, “I decided I would inject a sense of history in the place,” Law said. “What would have happened if all the people were allowed to live here, become citizens [and] have families?”

T’ai Chi for 1,000

Horatio Law is hosting free T’ai Chi workshops in the AiR Studio at 3623 S.W. River Parkway, on Wednesday, May 14, from 10 a.m. to noon and May 21 and 28 from 6 p.m. to 8 p.m.

He will also be in the studio every Tuesday and Wednesday in May, from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m., to answer questions and talk about Chinese people’s history in Oregon. The final event, T’ai Chi for 1,000, will take place May 31, from 10 a.m. to 11:30 a.m. in the Waterfront Park at Southwest Moody Avenue and Curry Street.