Life and Death

Art and the Body in Contemporary China

Silvia Fok

• Publisher: Intellect Books
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781841507644
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Kunst
• Subtopic: Asiatische Kunst

For all their ubiquity, life and death have not been fully explored as integral themes in many forms of contemporary Chinese art. Life and Death addresses that lacuna. Exploring the strategies employed by a variety of Chinese artists who engage with these timeless concerns, Silvia Fok opens a new line of inquiry about contemporary art in a rapidly changing environment. Fok focuses, in particular, on the ways in which these artists use their own bodies, animals' bodies, and other corporeal substances to represent life and death in performance art, installations, and photography. Over the course of her investigations, corporeality emerges as a common means of highlighting the social and cultural issues that surround these themes. By assessing its effectiveness in the expression of life, death, and related ideas, Fok ultimately illuminates the extent to which we can see corporeality as a significant trend in the history of contemporary art in China. Her conclusions will fascinate scholars of performance and installation art, photography, and contemporary Chinese art.

Chapter 1

Life, Death and the Body in Art in the PRC

The production and reception of contemporary Chinese art

The first unofficial “Stars Exhibition” (Xingxing meizhan) held in the garden outside the National Art Museum of China in September 1979, with the unexpected demonstration on National Day of 1979 drawing much local and international media attention, marks the beginning of contemporary art in the People’s Republic of China (PRC). Their pursuit of autonomy of art and freedom of expression is not yet realised under the Chinese Communist Party regime.¹ Nevertheless, contemporary Chinese art, both in the PRC and abroad, has caught much western attention in the past two decades.² A number of large-scale contemporary Chinese art exhibitions have been organised in different places outside the PRC.³ Chinese curators and overseas galleries have collaborated in mounting art exhibitions and introducing the works of Chinese artists. At the same time, a lot of small-scale experimental art exhibitions have been made possible in the PRC despite being frequently intervened in and closed down by the authorities.⁴ All public events, including cultural and art-related conferences, performances and tours involving foreigners must seek approval from the Ministry of Culture. If they find it subversive, they would close it down.⁵ Different forms of exhibitions, whether they are held in the artist’s apartment or studio, in the gallery or outdoors, have emerged in the PRC. Some Chinese artists were invited to take part in the “45th Venice Art Biennale” in 1993.”⁶ It was a starting point for them to be subsumed and included in the western art world even though they were still inexperienced at exhibiting internationally at that time. The “48th Venice Art Biennale” (1999) allocated different exhibition pavilions for Chinese artists. For instance, in the Aperto section, there were 19 Chinese artists, including Cai Guoqiang, Chen Zhen and Wang Du who have been living abroad, mostly in the United States and in France; Zhang Huan who commutes between New York and Beijing; and others who are based in the PRC.⁷ Taiwanese artists also showed their works in their national pavilion.⁸ In addition, six Chinese artists living in Europe were invited to exhibit in another pavilion.⁹

The growing interest in contemporary Chinese art has certainly been linked to the growing art market both abroad and in the PRC since the 1979 “Stars Exhibition.” Collectors of contemporary Chinese art are mostly foreigners. The discourse and writings on contemporary Chinese art by foreign and local art critics accompanying exhibition catalogues have helped promote and activate the field. Debate on hot issues such as the indecent, violent and provocative trends in the PRC also arises. Some Chinese artists have started to critically explore different media such as human bodies, corpses and animal bodies to raise various issues about life and death. For instance, Sheng Qi hacked off his little finger to show his indignation at the Tiananmen crackdown in 1989 and created the four-digit handprint as his signature in his Aids series in 2000.¹⁰ Like Sheng Qi, Zhang Huan explores his relationship with the environment directly through his own bodily experience. In the work 65 Kg (1994), Zhang’s naked body is hung horizontally by iron chains along the iron beam at the ceiling in his studio. Blood (250ml) drips down from his body into the big medical bowl connected to a heater next to the bed underneath him on the floor. As a consequence, Zhang experiences his own endurance for an hour.¹¹ Different e-galleries and e-publications such as redgate.com and chinese-art.com have been launched in the late 1990s, which promulgate news about contemporary Chinese art and provide alternative space for understanding current work and issues. All the above phenomena prove that contemporary Chinese art is developing rapidly in parallel to its western counterpart, albeit under the continuing authoritarianism of China’s ruling Communist Party.

The artist’s body as a revolutionary tool in contemporary Chinese art: Somatic perception and criticism

Since the mid-1980s, the body has been used as an art medium and a key theme in contemporary Chinese art, including painting, sculpture, photography, performance art and video. After the Tiananmen incident in June 1989, all artistic activities stopped. Only in the early 1990s did artists start to portray themselves by different means. For instance, Fang Lijun made paintings of himself with a bald head. Zhang Xiaogang and Wang Jinsong portrayed the family in PRC by addressing the one-child policy via painting and photography respectively. Yue Minjun made an installation of multiple sculptures representing himself with blank grins. The body has frequently been used in performance art. Some forms of installation art and performing arts share with performance art the time-based, site-specific and body-centric characteristics. Performance art is not strictly “scripted” like the other art forms are. There are seldom rehearsals prior to the live performance even though some artists claim that they would test the effect of the properties or equipment beforehand. As the performance goes on, unexpected things may come up leading to different improvisations on site; this is what distinguishes it from other art forms. In addition, the body in a performance is dependent upon and at the same time limited by elements of the site. Both the body and site are constitutive of each other in conveying a message. The role of the artist’s body is to inspire and draw the spectators to reflect upon the message and meaning of the performance. The more explicit the body language, the more effective the message that is conveyed in a performance.

Performance art is not accepted in official venues. It is hard for an audience to watch performance work live in the PRC because most of them are made in remote sites to avoid police intervention and surveillance. Therefore, performance art has mostly been disseminated through performance photography, a new mode of consumption in the art market since the mid-1990s.

Compared with their western counterparts, who started to explore the body in art in the early twentieth century, which climaxed in the late 1960s and 1970s, Chinese artists began to employ their bodies in art quite late, since the mid-1980s. Amelia Jones in 1998 provided a comprehensive study and theorisation of body art in the West by means of “an instantiation (both an articulation and a reflection) of profound shifts in the notion and experience of subjectivity over the past thirty to forty years,” highlighting the masculine, modernist artistic subject in light of a performative conception of the artist/self as art object, and intersubjectivity concerning the relationship between artist and audience/interpreter.¹² On the other hand, Lea Vergine in 2000 summarises the use of the body as a language in art in the West as “triumphant, immolated, diffused, propagated, dramatic and tragic – the political, social, and mystical body. The body is the site of the extreme – the body as humanity’s most ancient instrument for speaking hic et nunc.”¹³ The growing interest in employing the body in art in contemporary China might be attributed to the awareness that the body is effective not just as a form of self-expression as it is in consumer culture,¹⁴ but also as an effective means for open and private confrontation – about self-empowerment and symbolic resistance against the suppressed state of existence in the PRC.

The ways in which Chinese artists have started to explore the use of the body in art is worth examining even though they are quite loose. This fragmented historical transformation and artistic context has laid ...