| These days it is hard to talk about Chinese experimental art without paying attention to action and performance art. The situation has certainly improved since the late 90s, when discussions on performance art remained limited to a small number of internationally renowned artists, and often took place within the broader context of the development of Chinese conceptual art. At that time, I started my own research in the field, which has culminated in my forthcoming book, Performance Art in China, to be published in October 2006 by Timezone 8 in Hong Kong. |  |
Mediated Subjects and Acting Bodies – Thomas J. Berghuis
These days it is hard to talk about Chinese experimental art without paying attention to action and performance art. The situation has certainly improved since the late 90s, when discussions on performance art remained limited to a small number of internationally renowned artists, and often took place within the broader context of the development of Chinese conceptual art. At that time, I started my own research in the field, which has culminated in my forthcoming book, Performance Art in China, to be published in October 2006 by Timezone 8 in Hong Kong.
The book follows six years of research in the field, and traces its history back to the late 70s—when a group of artists known as the Stars Group took their work to the street in an attempt to defy the bureaucratic control over the public display of art. During the course of the 80s, performance art came to serve an immediate social function—challenging the institutional classification of cultural production through direct engagements with the public domain. Early signs of an emerging discourse of performance were evident in a general move by artists, who wanted to reestablish their role as active producers in the creation of new, experimental visual structures. Often these took shape in the form of collaborative actions.
Towards the late 80s, an increasing number of artists started to use performance as a means of confronting their own personal expression of the body/self. What follows is the development of a distinct, local discourse of performance art in China, known as “xingwei yishu”—a term that pays special attention to behavioral action. Starting in 1986, the new discourse of performance art in China has its origin in performances that involved artists wrapping their bodies in paper or cloth.
According to some artists, the idea of wrapping up bodies came from seeing images of Christo and Jean Claude wrapping coastlines and famous buildings across the world. At the same time, these performances contained specific references to social alienation and they frequently addressed the way individual artists become trapped in their aspirations to produce public artworks in China.
By early 1989, performance art had become synonymous with the staging of violent actions, particularly after artist Xiao Lu fired two gunshots at her installation Dialogue during the opening of the “China Modern Art Exhibition” (or “China/Avant-Garde” exhibition) at the China Art Gallery. Ever since, the discourse on performance art in China has been surrounded by controversies. In the mid-90s, a small group of artists in an area known as the Beijing East Village conducted performances involving the naked body. They included artists such as Ma Liuming, Zhang Huan and Zhu Ming—all of whom have now become important members of the international art scene.
Over the years there has been increasing attention to performances that present explicit uses of the body/flesh—many of which are captured in photography and on video. Some of these performances have also given rise to even more radical uses of the body in installation practices and in so-called live-art events—as can be seen in recent works by artists such as Sun Yuan & Peng Yu, who have become known for using dead animals and human body parts. Other, even more extreme examples can be found in the earlier works by Zhu Yu, and particularly his 2000 performance Eating People, which caused great upheaval.
Other artists have begun to pay particular attention to the relationship between new media and performance, as can be seen in the video and photographic works of artists such as Qiu Zhijie, Song Dong and Wang Jianwei, among others. Hence, the discourse on Chinese performance extended into other fields of visual art practice, and thus necessitates an emphasis on how the subject is performed in many of these artworks produced over the past decade.
Performance art has become related to what I call "the role of the mediated subject of the acting body in art," which is grounded in the realization that the body is always present in art practices as well as their subsequent, secondary representations in media such as photography and video (and even painting). This concept contains the proposition that performances are acted out, and that this enactment involves the preparation of material, as well as the planning and arranging of the way the body operates in space—both in terms of its function in space and of its managing that space.
Instead of considering artworks based on their medium, I have found it important to discuss ways in which the mediated self of the artist is transfigured in the artwork. As the interest in performance art from China rises, it also becomes important to provide an historical discourse of some of its major practices. Hence, in addition to seven chapters of textual analysis tracing some of the major developments in performance art in China, this book also comes with 31,000-word chronology of performance art and related events in China between 1979 and 2004.
For further information, including details on publication and ordering, please visit: www.timezone8.com
