【Let Love Stream 1】You can only see me on an airplane (Chien Tzu-Chieh)

As agreed with the association’s coordinator,^[1]I arrived at the hospital before the performance began and was led into a small lounge about four or five ping in size. After explaining my purpose to two Medical Clown who were putting on their makeup, I watched as they continued discussing the day’s service list while strumming ukuleles and softly singing. On the small table in the room were makeup supplies and performance props. Nearby, another woman who was drinking a hand-shaken beverage was scrolling on her phone. Because she was wearing ordinary clothes, I initially thought she was also a Medical Clown. It was not until a nurse knocked and came in to get a drink and chatted with her for a few moments that I learned the woman on her phone was also a nurse. This lounge was not only a backstage area for the clowns’ performances, but also a nurses’ break room.

In our brief conversation, I explained that my role was that of an art critic who had obtained permission to intrude backstage, and that my job was to write an article about their performance. I had not expected to encounter nurses, however, or to observe the everyday interactions between them that were not part of the performance.

Perhaps because of my background in contemporary art, I have always found the shifting attributes of spaces fascinating. This was a special room inside a hospital that served no medical function, filled with the miscellaneous belongings of nurses and Medical Clown—the touring Medical Clown needed a temporary backstage area, while a nurses’ lounge was a backstage space that we, who usually enter hospitals as patients or family members, had never imagined we could enter. This private interior also drew my attention to the scene of Medical Clown and nurses chatting before going onstage. Although they belonged to different professional fields, in this hidden space where they had shed their roles, they coexisted with remarkable ease.

The performance began afterward, and I followed the Medical Clown’ lively footsteps into hospital corridors lined with wards on both sides. The performance did not begin immediately after the change of space. The clowns chatted with several nurses and patients’ family members whom they encountered in succession. They seemed to have known one another for a long time, asking about the patients’ conditions. What was called a performance felt more like a gradual, intermittent process. They slowly displayed a state different from the composure they had shown in the lounge; their tones became increasingly animated and energetic. Later, while chatting with patients’ family members, they began weaving in segments that fell somewhere between everyday concern and performance. The lively atmosphere was more like encountering an extroverted, high-energy friend: the conversation was somewhat out of control, but joyful. Yet because we had already entered the treatment area, I could also hear the various medical sounds produced by busy nurses, doctors, and volunteers. This place, where the dual settings of medicine and the performing arts overlapped, was the stage area of Dr. Red Nose.

At National Taiwan University Children’s Hospital, I heard Dr. Red Nose tell children in different rooms several times, “This can also be used to wipe your butt.” Judging from the children’s laughter, it worked quite well. As for what could be used to wipe one’s butt, that changed according to the ward and the patient’s condition at the time. I found that these performances contained no typical object that could definitively be called a “prop” to enhance the clown’s act. The one prop that never changed and unmistakably served as a means of recognition was the “red nose” on the Medical Clown’ faces. As for the ukuleles they carried on their backs but did not necessarily play in every ward, they seemed more like part of their costumes. I also heard Dr. Red Nose sing a patriotic song with an elderly gentleman on the corridors of Taipei Veterans General Hospital, accompanying themselves on the ukulele.

But when they needed to play, the Medical Clown’ singing and music still did not overpower the medical sounds mentioned above. For example, as I passed the nursing station, I heard an intern say, “The chromosome report is out,” while, in a ward not far away, Red Nose pretended to be a child hiding in a cabinet or refrigerator. I noticed that Red Nose loved pretending not to see the children. This game of being here or not being here of course had an appropriate age range, but compared with the decisive force of the medical sounds from the nursing station, to my ears as an observing art critic, whether one was here or not carried another, painful irony. Yet the Medical Clown’ pretense brought the children another kind of power belonging to play. Being here or not being here also meant that, for a short time, they logged out of their identities as patients. The children’s laughter was proof that they had entered the game.

A certain thinker, probably from France, once said, “Play is a ritual that forgets its origins.” As I also reflected on the significance of Red Nose’s performance art, I thought that, at least for child patients, the reason Medical Clown could produce so much laughter was perhaps, more importantly, the temporary forgetfulness brought by play. When I saw Red Nose tell a child, “Your food smells so good,” while making a predatory expression, the hungry art critic in me also became curious about what the little patient was having for lunch. But when the two Dr. Red Nose began pinching each other’s red noses as they argued over just how fragrant it was, eventually leaving themselves short of breath, I also observed that the adults nearby could not help smiling amid the child’s laughter.

Compared with the medical system that patients are forced to enter because of illness, Red Nose’s performance may resemble the anthropological distinction between play and ritual. Origins are always solemn and reduce everything to order, while the temporary disorder brought by Red Nose casts order far aside. It not only allows patients, as audience members, to detach themselves from the roles that brought them here, but also expands the seats in the audience from hospital beds to the family members sitting beside them.

Of course, several wards declined Red Nose’s offer to perform. Some may simply have been sleeping or resting. But as I followed Red Nose through the hospital corridors, I happened to overhear a parent who had come out to make a phone call asking how to apply for low-income assistance. Many of the audience members confronting the grave seriousness of life and death do not welcome performances. This also shows that even though Red Nose faces a relatively fixed audience consisting of patients and accompanying family members, this audience’s expectations of the performance are inconsistent. Such inconsistency greatly increases the difficulty of performing.

Unlike in a conventional theater, where the audience’s harshest demand is a performance that satisfies them, the inconsistency among this hospital audience arises from their refusal of their own status as audience members. These audience members, young and old alike, do not want to become an audience; those gathered around the audience members do not want to become an audience either. They have ample emotional grounds for not wanting to be an audience in the circumstances of this moment. In fact, accepting “performances” that originally belong to medical practice is already highly difficult, let alone performances involving art.

If we must draw a boundary between the art that exists within Dr. Red Nose and everyday life, I would say that this boundary begins before Red Nose leaves the lounge. When Red Nose engages in small talk with nurses and behaves as though it has known patients’ family members for a long time, these actors, who have professional backgrounds in the performing arts, have already departed from the performance trajectories with which they are familiar. After leaving the lounge, they enter not a stage with clear boundaries. Without the customary protection of the fourth wall, the clowns await wounds and trauma, including the various chaotic predicaments brought about by invisible microorganisms and macroeconomics. They are engaged in gap work: work whose purpose is to pursue the greatest therapeutic effect within limited resources in the medical system, yet which still cannot encompass everything.

This is certainly difficult art. But art simply occurs within such gaps. As they try to heal an audience divided over whether to accept the performance, and as they shift from performing artists working within a theatrical framework to adopting the tones and postures of Dr. Red Nose, patients and family members gain precious breathing space and can seek roles in life after recovery that differ from the role of patient.

On this stage of life, where courage is the only thing one can rely on to contend with reality, Dr. Red Nose must immediately form another clown boundary. But no matter how solid this boundary, supplemented by the performing arts, may be, they, like patients, continue to encounter one unknown after another. Each stage is isolated from yet related to every other stage. When patients, under the authority of the medical system, have no choice but to submissively expose their bodies in the hospital ward—something that of course means relinquishing privacy and their own sense of identity—Dr. Red Nose, in the name of art, conceal their true selves within the role of the clown. Yet through their red noses, they also invite the audience to join this game of dressing up, using the power of the stage to strive to reveal that no matter how naked life itself may be, it is still worth fighting for with all our strength in order to be reborn.

But this also requires the patients’ participation and their ability to employ their imaginations together; only then can the performance create new situations. Once, Red Nose entered a ward, and the grandmother accompanying the child told the Medical Clown that the child could only lie on their back after surgery. Red Nose seized on the child’s inability to look straight ahead and once again launched into a boisterous game of “Are you here? You’re not here, are you?” (I had heard it about five times that day.) The little patient, deliberately ignored by Red Nose, giggled with delight. But they did not protest; instead, to create a new situation, they answered, “You can only see me on an airplane!”

^[1] I attended two Dr. Red Nose performances in total: the first on January 12, 2024, at Taipei Veterans General Hospital, and the second on March 29, 2024, at National Taiwan University Children’s Hospital. The four Dr. Red Nose in the two performances were all different people, but all were women. In this article, “they” always refers to Dr. Red Nose.

Artist, art critic, and curator; associate professor and department chair of the Department of Fine Arts at National Kaohsiung Normal University; PhD from the Graduate Institute of Art Creation and Theory at Tainan National University of the Arts. His professional fields are contemporary art and art criticism. He has taught at institutions including National Taiwan University of Arts and Taipei National University of the Arts, and has long been engaged in research, criticism, and curatorial practice in Taiwanese contemporary art. His exhibitions over the years have included projects at Kuandu Museum of Fine Arts, Juming Museum, and various public art projects. He has also participated in research projects for organizations including the National Culture and Arts Foundation and the Art Education Foundation. His work combines theory with on-site practice, striving to expand the critical perspectives of contemporary art in Taiwan and the social connections of public art.