An Invitation to Remember: A one-night sonic experience by Ruyi

Does your body remember when it was once a mountain?
Does your skin remember when it was once water?

Before you had a name

before you knew yourself as separate

do you still carry the memory of floating in the dark, warm ocean of the womb, 

where your first rhythms were shaped by another body’s tides?

… were you not already tide, mineral, 

breath, 

and light? 

On September 13, a poco art shifts from exhibition space into a landscape of sound.

Developed in response to Does the Body Remember?, Ruyi’s An Invitation to Remember invites us to look into the time when we were first moved by something became it became a story in our mind.

The work draws from Ruyi’s childhood memories of her grandmother’s hometown: moonlight over open fields, crickets, frogs, wind, rain, wet earth, and the sensation of being completely absorbed in the world before needing to understand it.

Through environmental sound, vibration, breath, and guided imagination, the gallery gradually transforms into an interior landscape of memory. Rather than asking participants to consciously retrieve the past, Ruyi invites the body to lead—toward sensations, affinities, and first encounters that may have shaped us long before they could be named.

A sound.
A texture.
Rain.
Moonlight.
Wet soil.

The first moment something in the world felt inexplicably important.

At the center of the experience is a question shared with the exhibition: what might the body remember before memory becomes narrative?

The Daoist concept of ziran (自然)—literally, “self-so,” or that which becomes itself—offers one way of approaching this return. Within ziran, becoming is not only something imposed, but something that arises when conditions allow a form to follow its own tendencies.

Here, remembering operates similarly.

Returning does not mean reconstructing a lost childhood or recovering an idealized “original self.” It means creating the conditions in which something already present may surface again: a forgotten fascination, an instinctive curiosity, the memory of what first moved us before taste became identity or desire required explanation.

As sound quiets the nervous system and attention returns to the body, memory becomes less something to search for than something to allow.

An Invitation to Remember asks whether remembering can itself be a form of becoming—and whether the way home might begin not only in the mind, but also in the body.

About Does the Body Remember?

Does your body remember when it was once a mountain?
Does your skin remember when it was once water?

Does the Body Remember? brings together works by Nancy Ivanhoe and Tia Xia to explore embodiment, material transformation, memory, and the unseen forces through which forms emerge.

Taking ziran as a conceptual point of departure, the exhibition approaches the body a porous field continually becoming through its relationships with landscape, matter, light, time, memory, and other bodies.

The moon offers a model for this condition: it shines with borrowed light and moves the tides from afar. Its force is invisible, yet bodies of water respond.

Across geometric structures, chromatic atmospheres, translucent membranes, accumulated materials, light, and shadow, the four artists similarly resist fixed form. Their works approach abstraction as a living ecology in which matter, perception, environment, and memory continually shape one another.

The exhibition also resonates with Martha Graham’s understanding of the body as the “house of breath.” Through contraction and release, Graham approached movement as something arising from within while remaining inseparable from gravity, rhythm, breath, and space. The body becomes an ecology through which invisible forces become perceptible.

An Invitation to Remember carries this inquiry from the visual into the sonic and somatic, asking what may emerge when the body is given another way to listen.