Rendering Flesh – Chinese Performance Art at the Turn of the Millennium

Thomas J. Berghuis

‘The next stage in the training of our young men will be physical education.’

‘Of course.’

‘And here again it must be carefully trained from childhood onwards. My own opinions about this are as follows: let me see if you agree. In my view physical excellence does not of itself produce a good mind and character: on the other hand, excellence of mind and character will make the best of the physique it is given. What do you think?

‘I agree.’

Plato, The Republic, Part Three [Book Two]

2. The place of physical education in our life. Physical education complements education in virtue and knowledge. Moreover, both virtue and knowledge reside in the body. Without the body there would be neither virtue nor knowledge. Those who understand this are rare. People stress either knowledge or morality. Knowledge is certainly valuable, for it distinguishes man from animals. But wherein is knowledge contained? Morality, too, is valuable; it is the basis of the social order and of equality between ourselves and others. But where does virtue reside? It is in the body that contains knowledge and houses virtue. It contains knowledge like a chariot and houses morality like a chamber. The body is the chariot that contains knowledge, the chamber that houses virtue. Children enter primary school when they reach the proper age. In primary school particular attention should be paid to the development of the body; progress in knowledge and moral training are of secondary importance.

Mao Zedong, “Twenty-eight-stroke Student” (April, 1917)

“Children do not try this at home!” For indeed, anyone who is interested in presenting contemporary art practices surrounding the body, this warning should be made at the start of his or her paper. Despite the strong role that the body has played in the physical and moral educating of our young apprentices in life, it can become a hazardous task to be talking about the recent visual structures that show artists transcending their own physical existence by staging or portraying their own body (or that of someone else) in raw and obscene displays of nudity, mutilation and decay. Whilst many are still staring at the rear view mirror, wondering whether passing objects 'may indeed be even closer than they appear,' they will not know what hits them when they encounter the sudden cause and effects of the chain reaction crash ahead of them.

These recent forms of artistic expression profoundly challenges our understanding of what it is to be human and what constitutes our humanity. ‘Yes,’ we do seem to be living in a transitional society where ‘those who are with us’ pledge allegiance to the principles of enlightened autocracy set forward by Plato, arguing how ‘self-control largely consist in obedience to our rulers’ and at the same time ‘ruling our own desire for the pleasures of eating, drinking, and sex’. Dislodged from the exclusivity of the private domain by the consumer-driven demands for shared spectacle, these basic human pleasures now command the popular public sphere. ‘United we stand on the new ‘Plateau of Humankind’ in an animated outburst of public gaiety and mirth.

Amidst the communal liberalization of food, booze and pornography the body decomposes into minute details, if not a ‘mere diversity of surfaces’. These discharges of collective corporality constitute the domains of popular advertisement, television and commercialized culture. Whereas the ‘fractal multiplication of body images’ has only just begun, the phase of ‘pure’ obscenity of the body has yet to emerge. ‘Pure’ in the sense that Jean Baudrillard would have it, whereby the spectacle has disappeared and the body becomes that of a simulated cyborg, or simulacra that is so vividly described by Philip K. Dick. Yet, a survey of the recent developments in contemporary performance art the practice across the world and in particular in China reveals there is still a spectacle, a stage, a theatre and an illusion surrounding the body. In performance the body most certainly continues to play an ambiguous role and is deflected from immediately transparency and exposure to the raw and ‘inexorable light of information and communication’, as is described by Jean Baudrillard. [1]

Should Foucault therefore be ‘forgotten’ in a discussion on performance and body art in China? Perhaps the fact that at least certain performance art practices are still conceived as ‘real time’ events, indicates that we must demand a pause, if not a P_A_U_S_E in the process of ‘characterizing the present’, and before shifting all our attention to the ‘post-orgy state of affairs’. [2] For, as Baudrillard puts it: “The orgy could be viewed as the epitome of the whole explosive movement of modernity, the movement of liberation in all domains: political liberation, sexual liberation, liberation of productive forces, liberation of destructive forces, liberation of women, liberation of the child, liberation of unconscious desires, the liberation of art.” [3] The recent controversies surrounding the publication of a catalogue under the title Bu Hezuo Fangshi (An Uncooperative Approach), also simply known by its English title FUCK OFF, shows there is still some work to be done before we can conclude that the explosive orgy of modernity in the arts and the liberalization of art practice surrounding the body no longer exists. [4]

For that reason, this essay follows the discussion on the role of the mediated subject of the acting body in art. [5] It takes contemporary art practices in China as a case study. The reason for choosing China as a field of studies comes from the fact that self-representation and the transcendence of the artist’s body/self in Chinese contemporary art practice happens to have been more evident than anywhere else, and in particular during the period from the mid 1980’s until the present day. Despite the wide range of discussions written on contemporary art so far – often leading to somewhat popular attempts to give concept, contents and context to these works – we must not distance ourselves from the apparent fact that the artist’s body is always present.

In an attempt to put some structure to this essay, the period between late 1978 until late 2001 has therefore been divided into two periods – an observation that also follows a common approach in examining the wide range of political economic and cultural historic events that occurred during this period. The first period runs through the ten years from late 1978 until early 1989, a period which has often been described as the post-Mao period, but could also be described as the Chinese ‘high modern-‘ or ‘high culture-movement’. In particular following the fact that many artists and intellectuals in China held ideals of constructing a new modern Chinese culture that would follow in the footsteps of the 1919 May Fourth Movement. For many people in China this period seem to have ended between the summer of 1988 with the nationwide television broadcasting of River Elegy (Heshang) and the summer of 1989, with first the China Avant-Garde or Modern Chinese Art Exhibition (Zhongguo Xiandai Yishu Zhan) in February 1989 and culminating in the massive student protest at Tiananmen and elsewhere in China, starting on 17 April and ending with the military crackdown on June 4th, 1989.

After Tiananmen all hopes and dreams to construct a ‘high culture’ have disappeared and instead one can witness the start of a ‘pop-culture’ where taste is defined by the principles of sheer market value and making a fast buck or ‘stir frying money’ (chao renminbi). The ideals, ideas, and icons of the previous past have been replaced by a form of ‘cynical realism’ and an obsessive-compulsive disorder in creating ‘close-up snap-shot multiplications of body images’ in which everyone and everything becomes genuine. This is the time where private mentality counts; a time of personal attitude; a time to say: “Everything is ‘A’ ‘O.K.’!” because ‘we play for thrills’, but ‘please don’t call me human,’ for I have never been nor seen such a being. [6] This is the generation that grew up during the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976) and where left to become ‘bumming’ riffraff’s (pizi) [7] . During the late 1970’s and early 1980’s many of them joined the army, somehow hoping to find their role models of Lei Feng and the red young lady (hong se niang). [8] Thereafter many went to one of the reopened universities and art academies around China. Here they were taught the fine art skills of socialist revolutionism and academic formalism. ‘Painting from real life’ often involved the invitation of ‘life-models’ to the classroom. But rarely were the artists invited to incorporate the character beneath the surface they were sketching, painting or carving.

Representations of flesh became almost pornographic in their imagery and this can perhaps best be seen in the paintings of the nude that were produced at academies across China during the first half of the 1980’s. These photo-realistic portraits, which became immensely popular during the initial years of economic and cultural developmentalism in China during the 1980’s and often consisted of nude women, leave no ambiguity in the eyes of the beholder. Instead these images seem to be suffering from what Baudrillard has called ‘an excess of truth and precision’ that makes them almost ‘asexual’, where it not for the fact that: “Our true desire is for their technique, their artifice, and nothing else.” [9]

These images of the nude would remain popular export products during the entire course of the 1980’s, following a high demand by overseas collectors. At the same time, there were also a growing number of artists in China who became interested in taking the representation of body images to the raw, depicting not only the external human beauty of the body, but also the multiple characters beneath the surface of the soft skin, including the ‘abject’ and the ‘absent’ body-flesh. An early example are the so called ‘scar-paintings’, in which artists often aim in representing the physical and mental pain imposed on the body-self during the Cultural Revolution, leading to visual structures that show the body in pain and traumatic loss. These paintings, together with many of the other visual structures produced in China during the course of the 1980’s and early 1990’s, can easily become seen as representations, if not careful illustrations of ‘real’ historical events. But such a view can only be consistent at a time that history is still written in the form of meta-narratives, in which isolated events are able to represent the whole of history. However, as is frequently the case following periods of all out destruction and amidst the loss of former power structures, artists regularly tend to place emphasize on the mythic imagination that empowers history.

Therefore, as has already been shown in recent studies on the work of Anselm Kiefer, which place emphasis on Kiefer as a post-WO II German artist, these ‘scar paintings’ produced in China during the post-Mao period also seem to indicate representations of “a memory that itself lies in ruins.” [10] Even so, many artists in China during the post-Mao reform period continue to place an important role in their works to the representation of the human body, and incorporate the self-representation of the artist self, instead of seeking the subject matter outside the actual practice of art and the life of the artist itself. As a result, following the demise of Mao Zedong the artist regularly tends to reappear and is often (if not always) present in experimental artworks. During the course of the 1990’s and following the loss of hope in constructing a high modern culture for China, more artists are further becoming involved in producing even more radical body art performances.

To many viewers these works may pose a threat to humanity, but in fact they seem to offer a unique opportunity to promote the regeneration of public morality and expanding the order of capital. [11] However, these so-called ‘barbaric displays of the mundane’ are also more frequently become used to endorse the numerous examples of more sincere experimental artworks. Such can be seen in particular when taking into consideration the ongoing restructuring of the official policy making process for the production and reception of Chinese art. [12] Perhaps it is therefore important to conclude that, where it not for the incentives of a new group of cutting-edge artists who are pushing the boundaries of arts production towards a new extreme, the former ‘Chinese avant-gardist’ would never be able to strengthen their positions in the global art scene. Let me therefore end this essay in repeating some of the words spoken in 1917, whereby “In order to civilize the mind one must first make savage the body.” [13]

Thomas J. Berghuis is currently a Lecturer in Asian Art at the Department of Art History & Film Studies, University of Sydney. His book, Performance Art in China, was published in 2006 with Timezone 8 in Hong Kong.

---

[1] See: Jean Baudrillard. The Ecstasy of Communication. Translated from French by Bernard Schutze and Caroline Schutze. New York: Semiotext(e), 1988, pp. 21-22

[2] Here I refer to the official title of the 2002 Gwangju Biennale P_A_U_S_E that was held from 29 March to 29 July in Gwangju, South Korea, under the directorship of artistic director Wan-kyung Sung. For more insight in formulating the initial proposal for pause, see also: Hou Hanru. “Dynamic Pause or Alternative Global Collaboration: Some Idealistic Ideas on a Proposal”. In: Yu Hsiao-Hwei, ed. On the Mid-Ground: Hou Hanru, Selected Texts. Hong Kong: Timezone 8 Ltd, 2002, pp. 156-165

[3] Jean Baudrillard. “Transpolitics, Transsexuality, Transaesthetics”. Translated from French by Michel Valentin. In: William Stearns and William Chaloupka. Jean Baudrillard – The Disappearance of Art and Politics. Hounsmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire and London: MacMillan Academic and Professional Ltd., pp. 21-22

[4] See: Ai Weiwei and Feng Boyi, ed. Bu Hezuo Fangshi/ FUCK OFF. Hong Kong: Hong Kong33, 2000 (ISBN 962-86388-6-6). The publication originated and bears the title of an exhibition that was held at Eastlink Gallery in Shanghai simultaneously with the 2000 Shanghai Biennale. A discussion on the controversies surrounding the publication of this catalogue will be published in April 2004 in Positions. See: Thomas J. Berghuis. “Eating People is Wrong, Right? - Positioning Experimental Art in China", in: Positions: East Asian Culture Critique, Washington: Duke University Press (Forthcoming)

[5] See: Thomas J. Berghuis. “Flesh Art: Performance and Body Art in Post-Mao China”. In: Chinese Type Contemporary Art Magazine, Vol. 4, Issue 5 (December 2001). Online at: http://www.chineseart.com

[6] For these last two sentences I have been quoting the English translation of the titles on two bestselling novels by the Chinese writer Wang Shuo, which first appeared in Chinese during 1988 and 1989 and that sold millions of copies throughout the country. See: Please Don’t Call Me Human (Qing wen bie ba wo dang ren). Translated into English by Howard Goldblatt. New York: Hyperion East, 2000; Wang Shuo. Playing for Thrills (Wan de jiushi xintiao). Translated into English by Howard Goldblatt. Harpenden, Herts: No Exit Press, 1997.

[7] The Chinese term pizi is often translated as hoodlum or ruffian. As both these terms often have become used to describe violent persons that are involved in crime, I have instead used the term riffraff, which more clearly describes the disreputable or undesirable characters identified in the present usage of the Chinese term pizi.

[8] Lei Feng was a revolutionary hero often used in propaganda campaigns for the Peoples Liberation Army, even after the military crackdown of the student protest movement at Tiananmen on 4 June 1989. The red young lady (hong se niang) is a character that played a leading role in the eight Revolutionary opera’s that were allowed to be staged during the Cultural Revolution.

[9] Jean Baudrillard. “Transpolitics, Transsexuality, Transaesthetics”. Translated from French by Michel Valentin. In: William Stearns and William Chaloupka. Jean Baudrillard – The Disappearance of Art and Politics. Hounsmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire and London: MacMillan Academic and Professional Ltd., p.16

[10] Following a quotation by Ernst van Alphen from Andreas Huyssen’s essay “Anselm Kiefer: The Terror of History, the Temptation of Myth.” in October, no. 48, pp. 25-46. See: Ernst van Alphen. Caught by History: Holocaust effects in Contemporary Art, Literature and Theory. Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 1997. For further references to the work of Anselm Kiefer also see: Lisa Saltzman. Anselm Kiefer and art after Auschwitz. Cambridge, NewYork: Cambridge University Press, 1999

[11] Following an earlier remark made in an essay on performance and body art practices in China. See: Thomas J. Berghuis. “Flesh Art: Performance and Body Art in Post-Mao China”. In: Chinese Type Contemporary Art Magazine, Vol. 4, Issue 5 (December 2001). Online at: http://www.chinese-art.com/Contemporary/volumefourissue5/flesh.htm.

[12] See for example: John Clark. "System and style in the practice of Chinese contemporary art: The disappearing exterior?," in: Yishu -Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art, vol. 1, no. 2 (Summer/ August 2002), 13-33

[13] Mao Zedong, “Twenty-eight-stroke Student” (April, 1917). For this paper I have been using the selected translations in English by Stuart Schram. “Prologue: The Pre-Marxist Period in Mao Tse-tung’s Development”. In: The Political Thought of Mao Tse-tung. London and Dunmow: Pall Mall Press, 1963, pp. 94-102 In addition there is a full translation of the essay published in French. See: Mao Ze-dong. Une etude de l’éducation physique. Paris: Mouton, 1962