The classic silk Qipao dress is automatically associated with traditions which complement Chinese women’s virtue. Exquisite and simple, their elegance and sensual design is aesthetically tailored and often embroidered with delicate patterns of flora and fauna, real or mythical. In this work, a simple performance is recorded and revealed in an identical cycle which reflects the themes inherent in the dress which the artist has assumed for the role. She walks slowly away from the fore, turns in a step and approaches the viewer with a dynamic and gentle flourish, leaping high into the air with the phosphorescent patterns and colours of the Qipao tracing her movement. An instance breaks with tradition, especially the modesty accorded to women of China, when the descent allows for her dress to lift up and reveal her underpants. The accident is coy, funny and poignant. The dancer betrayed the necessity of a costume to conform to physical movement, not to the moral code of a society. That instance where the boundaries of etiquette, traditional associations and taste are broken leads to a visual brief- no pun intended- on the contradictions which society bestows on the modern woman. Familial and societal, patriarchal, expectations of uniformity of comportment, dress and modes of behavior are ruptured with the need to adapt to the demands and logistics of international systems-the spheres of contemporary art and performance , economic independence and evolutions in the societal context dictate expediential change- which prove to be constituents of the paradoxical plight of the modern China women. Qipao enacts upon the theme of this same plight, in a moment, an amplification of the era wherein societal convention expects traditional representations of beauty, where global conformism insists on their transformation, independance lessens the importance of a women being decorative and, essentially, where artistic creation may reveal more than the expected. As to whether or not what is revealed is truly subject for moral condemnation, personal indignation or believed to be playful liberation is for the audience to reflect upon. [Rajath Suri]