Ho Sin Tung

In the traditional dance field, the intolerance of physical abnormalities is firmly established. The art form is almost eugenic as the discipline tends to exclude all bodies that are not perfectly fit. In the past, people with physical abnormalities could dance but only as a spectacle to be consumed in Freak Show. At the same time, dance has always created monsters visually, by requiring “normal” dancers to distort their bodies. Norms could therefore appear as a source of suffering for both normal and abnormal bodies.

Ho creates a series of portraits of dancers with multiple limbs. Some of the dancers overlap their limbs to create the monstrous shape, while some of them were simply born into this.

Polymelia is a birth defect which causes the affected individual to have more than the usual number of limbs. And the extra limbs are usually deformed. But in Ho’s drawings all the limbs are long and sturdy, hinting a creature not conforming to this world, reminding us of the original nature of man according to the comic playwright Aristophanes in Plato’s Symposium.