Introduction

“Be formless, shapeless, like water. If you put water in a cup, it becomes the cup. Now, water can flow or creep or drip or crash. Be water, my friend.” Bruce Lee, the Chinese-American pop culture icon who combined martial arts, film-acting and philosophy, repeated variations of this metaphor in several interviews in the 1970s, and it has since become a widespread internet meme. He expanded on it in his collected writings, posthumously published in 2001, describing an occasion when sailing alone at sea he got mad at himself and punched the water: “I struck it with all of my might yet it was not wounded! Then I tried to grasp a handful of it but this proved impossible. This water, the softest substance in the world, which could be contained in the smallest jar, only seemed weak. In reality, it could penetrate the hardest substance in the world. That was it! I wanted to be like the nature of water.” This story echoes a passage that Lee must have known, from the Tao Te Ching: “Nothing is weaker than water, but when it attacks something hard or resistant, then nothing withstands it and nothing will alter its way.”

A consideration of the various meanings––both in reality and as metaphor––of liquidity, and of the kinds of vessel that might contain liquid, or indeed float on its surface, is what connects the diverse contributions to this issue of Soanyway, beginning once again with two exhibition features. Whether through object-making, installation, film, music, poetry, performance, image-making, translation or textual experimentation, they all explore ideas of fluidity, containment, spillage or immersion.