The project is inspired by the Japanese visual designer Akiko YABUMOTO’s publication An Illustrated Book of Extinct Gestures: A Hundred Obsolete Gestures, in which the author depicts quotidian postures that are going to alter or vanish due to changes of times, technologies, and the environment through illustrations of body gestures, such as the actions of slapping CRT televisions, punching tickets at gates of public transport when boarding or alighting, loading film in a camera, doing a tape test for pinworms, checking watches, stamping, etc. The illustrations only demonstrate the plain characters with their postures and appearances without presenting identifiable objects or settings. The actions and clues about their times implied by the body images are like those of comics and murals, being completely static while revealing time and motion. They put knowing smiles on readers and, in the meantime, subtly summon the body experiences and bodies that are not long before but seemly belong to previous lives.

Bodies are a museum, which is not an unfamiliar concept in the context of contemporary art nowadays. Nonetheless, how the relationships between buttons and the action of pressing, between screens and watching, between body shapes and spaces, and between paces and time can be “museologized,” as well as be discussed, displayed, and demonstrated based on the concept of “museologizing” to reflect on the relationships per se and embody the characteristics of bodies as being a museum? The project attempts to study and develop the creative idea through the mechanisms of rehearsing and improvisation in performing arts to present multiple appearances, graphs, daily signs, and body memories crisscrossing on bodies in the form of histories, illustrations, and genealogies.