If you’ve visited Taipei’s Gongguan Night Market (公館夜市) in the past few weeks, you may have noticed a bearded British man in a metal market stall with a red sign that reads “Biggest Knee Joint”(最大膝關節) wearing a wrestling suit and offering to tape people’s knees.
Most people shy away or ignore him when he asks them in broken Chinese to try his services, but a few curious souls do step into the stall, stand on its platform and allow him to clean their knees and apply kinesiology tape in different brightly-colored variations. This, he says, stabilizes and strengthens the kneecap and joints to prevent injury during heavy use.
Many participants walk away a bit confused, but one man says he later played basketball with the tape on. A high school wrestler, enthusiastically talking about the sport, is excited to have the procedure done.
Photo: Han Cheung, Taipei Times
This installation is part of Charlie Evans’ research during his two-month stay in Taiwan as a resident designer for World Design Capital Taipei. A wrestling enthusiast and technical tutor at Goldsmiths, University of London, Evans is interested in looking at the body as a design object.
With the residency, Evans chose “life quality and health” out of the four themes, and his Body Buildings project aims to explore the different rituals and practices people do to protect, develop and understand their bodies.
“Exercise is the first entry point to reunderstand our bodies,” Evans says. “But typically we might start to understand out of injury, illness or disability, where exercise becomes a way of producing and protecting it. I’m trying to explore different ways of training to prepare the body for different events.”
Photo: Han Cheung, Taipei Times
INTO THE NIGHTMARKET
Evans looked at a number of physical practices in the city, going from watching people exercise in the park and observing the architecture of sports centers to taking part in a pushing hands workshop (推手), participating in Japanese “strong style” wrestling and training with firefighters.
From this, Evans wanted to perform a small ritual and exchange to introduce the idea of protecting the body to people who may or may not engage in physical activity on a regular basis, and came up with the idea of applying kinesiology tape to passersby in the night market.
Photo: Han Cheung, Taipei Times
“Typically, something like kinesiology tape and physical therapy or some other type of [bodily] learning process,” Evans says. “It has to do with rehabilitation, and that often happens after an injury. I was trying to find ways to introduce care and maintenance before the injury.”
Evans says he is simply trying to induce a “tiny shift in understanding” and does not expect to change anybody’s life — nor would there be any way to gauge that unless he kept in touch with the people he taped.
“It’s really easy to be critical about people based on their lifestyle and diet choices,” Evans says. “I think there’s an important distinction to make between an authoritative top-down idea of how we should live and deciding that the body is a thing that we live in. It’s personal, and we can build a relationship with it and care for it.”
Photo: Han Cheung, Taipei Times
Despite having a price list on his stall, Evans says he hasn’t managed to charge any money for his services, adding that it was mostly just a way to make it look more authentic. The point is to make it blend in as much as possible while containing unexpected behaviors.
“But obviously I kind of undermined it because it’s visibly this foreigner doing this weird action,” Evans says. “I think if a Taiwanese was in that stall, it could potentially be a site for more exchange and meaning.”
ABSTRACT IDEAS
Evans says he has kept his work rather abstract due to time and language constraints, although he admits that many people have told him they don’t really understand his work.
“Actually, it is not a finished design outcome,” he says. “It’s using design processes and thinking to research a set of ideas. It would be a waste of anyone’s time to spend two months just jumping to an outcome. It would be rushed and superficial.”
But through the market stall, Evans says he has been able to gain an understanding of transitioning from being a stranger to a caregiving relationship.
“It has to do with processes like cleaning of the knee, because it’s an action that is immediately readable but allows me to make contact ... There’s a transition there between behaviors and what’s permissible, what makes sense and what’s comfortable.”
There are concrete results, such as the market stall and photos of the taped knees, which will be on display at the Taipei International Design House Exhibition in October. Evans also hosted two body-related drawing workshops this past weekend where he had participants draw normally, then draw with certain body parts such as the mouth or elbow, then engage in a series of physical warm-up exercises and finally depict the exercises and which body parts they had trouble with in an informative fashion.
Evans says he will need some time to process all that he’s done in Taipei, but he thinks it will be useful for future projects.
“I’d like to think my time here has allowed me to explore a set of ideas and thoughts that overtime develop into something less ambiguous and could be used for something a bit more grounded — maybe something the government may be able to use,” he says.
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