I find myself now in a desperate state of mind about what people value in art today, where certain rules and conventions, and ways of thinking contradict the way art actually feels and what it means to be human. More so, I find that art making, solitary as the artist may be, is exacerbated by a degree of alienation that is detrimental to the artist’s survival. Art is both a solitary act and a social activity, as the artist and the viewer make attempts at building new structures of understanding.
— Brook Hsu
While meaning in art is shared, its making can get pretty lonely. Brook Hsu is an artist, a painter. Living between New York and Wyoming, she spends the majority of her working life in conversation with material: wood, canvas, paint, ink, shellac. Born out of a desire to expand her practice into the social, she recently curated an exhibition at Kiang Malingue called From Being Jealous of a Dog’s Vein in which she asked the artists involved to allow her to treat their artworks as dancers.
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During the final hours of that exhibition, Brook met Eiko Otake after inviting her in for a walkthrough. While Eiko has lived and worked in New York City for fifty years, she continues to find herself a stranger in new places. With her ongoing project A Body in Places, Eiko has carried the smell of her formative teenage years in late ’60s Tokyo to nearly one hundred sites thus far. At Brook’s invitation, she has spent extensive time in 222 Bowery creating a place-based score that she calls A Stranger in the Bunker, which reflects her relationship (or lack thereof) to the literary lineage of the space.

Eiko performs once on Saturday, takes Sunday to regret what she did, and performs for a second time on Monday.