The China Project

45 Three Decades: The Contemporary Chinese Collection The performances by artists from the Beijing East Village reinforced the important interaction between physical conduct and the embodiment of environment in the process of art production. These performances brought out increasingly compound notions of time and space, resulting in a multiplicity of art forms that incorporate some level of attention to the process of the body and to the re-mediation of corporeal endurance. To make sense of these notions, it becomes important to draw attention to the concept of the role of the mediated subject of the acting body in art, which is grounded in the realisation that the body is always present in art practices, as well as their subsequent, secondary representations. This concept contains the proposition that performances are acted out , and that this enactment involves the preparation of material as well as planning and arranging the way the body operates in space — both in terms of its function in space and of its managing of space. 22 In May 1995, 11 artists from the East Village assembled at a mountain in the countryside of Beijing Municipality, near the village of Huairou, and conducted their group performance To add one meter to an anonymous mountain . For this performance, the artists travelled up a mountain overlooking the entire region. Here, they prepared a line-up in front of a scale. One by one, the artists removed their clothes and moved to the scale, where they called out their name, sex and exact weight. Then each of the artists lay on top of each other to form a stack of naked bodies that added exactly one metre to the anonymous mountain. Compared to the performances and installations that were produced at the Great Wall during the late 1980s, To add one meter to an anonymous mountain transcended the desire to incorporate cultural–historic sites in the construction of a new modern art. The performance surpassed any type of reference to a symbolic location, and aspired to provide context for the mourning of national culture. Instead, the new generation of artists in China during the 1990s was more focused on producing a direct link between the immediate experience of the private individual and his or her personified surroundings. Artists in China often use the term huanjing when speaking about their art practices, which is the way their work deals directly with notions of the individual’s physical and emotional ‘surroundings’. 23 In the visual arts, huanjing is linked to the context in which an art work operates, thereby positioning the work in direct relation to the time, place and space of artistic production. The term huanjing offers a new conceptual tool for understanding art, an important aspect of experimental art in China; namely how new artistic positions are formed in the remediation of embodied practices through corporeal notions of time, place and space. Together, these cognate notions of ‘perception’ and ‘sensibility’ constitute the concept of the role of the mediated subject of the acting body in art. The shift from staged action to explorations of the mediated subject through the acting body/ self took a further turn in the late 1990s, when a growing number of artists started to develop performances in which they increasingly emphasised physical endurance and the transcendence of the body. These new developments in performance art can be seen in the work of He Yunchang, another highly acclaimed performance artist in China. He was born in 1967 in Kunming, Yunnan Province (south-west China), and moved to Beijing in 1998, where he prepared a wide range of major performance works. Initially, He would go back to Kunming to stage his performances, but later would begin performing at sites across China and internationally. His performances derive from ancient ideas about the contexts of space, place and time, and many of He’s performances combine natural elements such as water, earth and fire. They frequently draw inspiration from ancient Chinese fables, which tell of miraculous heroes and mysterious deities. He’s performances are all based on physical endurance and testing the limitations of the artist’s earthly body. Sometimes his endeavors produce an outcome, but most of the time, the performances seem to have no clear result except, perhaps, in the eye of the beholder. For example, in the 1999 performance Dialogue with water , the artist is seen dangling from a crane above a river and holding a knife to ‘cut the river in half’. Some viewers would say that this act is pointless, and his attempts seem to have been completely in vain. However, these performances are akin to Chinese folklore — their stories retold as fables, becoming part of artist mythology.