Museum of Chinese in America (MoCA)

Armat Ritual: Live Art & Meditation is a participatory, time-based work by Yadi Liu that unfolds through a sequence of gestures, encounters, and collective attention. The project brings together drawing, sound, and social space as a shared ritual.

The work begins with an act of offering: tea is served to each participant, followed by a collective gesture of drinking that marks a shift into a shared temporal field. Participants are then invited into one-on-one encounters with the artist, translating internal states into color, language, and mark-making. These exchanges accumulate as a living visual archive of subjective “inner weather.”

As the environment deepens, live vocal guidance by Michel Pascal introduces a sonic structure that supports collective attention. Photographic images of participants are captured and reworked through real-time drawing, where lines emerge, obscure, and reconfigure the body, tracing an ephemeral layer of presence beyond fixed representation. The session concludes with collective humming, extending individual perception into a shared field.

Situated between performance, installation, and social ritual, Armat Ritual considers how interior experience, thought, emotion, and perception, might be made perceptible as a collective form.