IKEBANA PERFORMANCE

Choreographic Honey, once veiled in time, 2026

Ikebana Performance | Installation, mixed media, vessels by Rescued Clay, preserved green materials, recycled wax gathered from discarded churches candles, coloured tree branches, dimensions variable

Performance duration: approx. 25 minutes

ON HEALING: London Chapter PF25 cultural projects x Department of Film Studies, King's College London

The College Chapel, King's College London

Curated by Angelika Li

Artists: Oscar Chan Yik Long, Kit Hung, and Hedy Leung

Conversation with Dr. Wing-Fai Leung, Department of Culture, Media & Creative Industry, King's College London

“Choreographic Honey, once veiled in time” unfolds as a meditation on healing through movement, material, and collective memory. Inspired by the communicative logic of the bees’ waggle dance, the Ikebana performance approaches bees’ choreography as an embodied language: a system of guidance that traces pathways of relation, care, and restoration.

The installation incorporates rescued clay vessels, marked by time and use, repurposed as containers within ikebana-inspired compositions. Embracing asymmetry, imperfection, and transience, these arrangements do not erase damage but hold it gently, allowing past and present to coexist. The vessels become sites of recovery, where new life is sustained without denying historical traces.

Honey, long associated with healing, protection, and preservation, resonates through the use of recycled wax gathered from discarded church candles. What was once residue returns as a substance of care, suggesting that healing often emerges from what has been overlooked or left behind.

The work also reflects on acts of concealment, such as whitewashing of damaged walls after the war, gestures that both cover and suspend wounds. Here, healing is not framed as immediate repair, but as a gradual unveiling. Through attentive, choreographed actions, layers are approached with sensitivity, allowing what was hidden to re-emerge over time.

Like a bee colony, the work proposes healing as a collective process, an ecology of attunement and response. The choreography becomes a slow reweaving: layer by layer, gesture by gesture, fragments are brought into relation. What emerges is not a return to an untouched past, but a renewed whole, altered, fragile, and sustained through care.

Photos: © Miki Buckland, courtesy of PF25 cultural projects