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Lot Essay
Formed in 1993, the Beijing East Village was home to some of the most radical Chinese contemporary artists of their generation. An avant-garde community located in the outskirts of the city, the name of the village was inspired from New York City's East Village, itself a hotbed of artistic creativity in the 1980s. This self-conscious association highlights one core aspect of this group, who saw themselves as outsiders to Chinese society, living quite literally "off-the-grid" on the outskirts of Beijing in ad hoc villages largely populated by farmers and undocumented migrant labourers, who from this obscure locale sought to assert their position in the field of Chinese and international experimental art practice.
Outside the watchful gaze of the authorities, they hosted many influential performance events, using their own bodies as subject and medium. Such an approach was expeditious for artists living in near-poverty, but also gave their works bluntly visceral quality that resonates to this day. Artists from this group included such notable figures as Zhang Huan, Ma Liuming, Cang Xin, Zhu Ming, and Rong Rong. Responding to the rapid modernisation facing their nation and their own feelings of disenfranchisement, their contemporaries in the field of painting gravitated towards oblique and highly personal symbolic styles that allowed them to critically address and reflect upon their changing environment. This coterie of performance-minded artists pursued a more interventionist and confrontational ethic, inspired in part by their derelict living circumstances as they sought to disrupt the cultural conservatism and complacency surrounding them, and which ironically often made them even less accessible to a broad audience. The staging of these performances, and their resulting photographs, then are all that remains of this audacious and unique period.
Often performing nude and sometimes at the risk of physical harm, these artists sought to radically upend taken-for granted notions of decorum, society and aesthetic experience. Even after the eventual destruction of the village and expulsion of the artists, a reliance of the body as prop, symbol and medium remains consistent throughout these artist's works. As with Zhang Huan's iconic and haunting Family Tree , featured in the Evening sale (Lot 2032), or his manipulation of his features in Skin (Lot 2452) into a series of absurdist expressions and meaningless semaphores, Zhang continues to rely on his own self-image as a motif to engage and subvert the representation of the body, the figure and the individual. As he has stated, "The body is a proof of identity and also a kind of language." For Zhang Huan in particular, as his career became increasingly international in scope, the language of the body was also one that shifted in its contextual registers. In Zhang's museum-based projects and performances, like Seeds of Hamburg produced for the exhibition of the same title, where Zhang was covered in sunflower seeds and surrounded by doves, serves as martyr, victim and liberator (Lot 2454). Similarly, Ma Liuming, whose earliest works exploited his own gender-ambiguous features, has extrapolated his experiences in the realm of performances into a series of symbolic self-portraits in different life stages, his features abstracted into an elusive state of transformation and becoming.
Many artists come to Beijing from provinces all over China to this day. The works of the East Village artists recall a distinct moment in time and essential period in the development of Chinese contemporary art. The documentation of the performances is the only remains of the village's artistic legacy, a legacy of audacious, risky and idealistic art-making, and one that was created before the hope of a viable career as an independent artist seemed within the realm of possibility. Performance art is a medium that foregrounds fundamental questions about the human condition that can be visually and conceptually composed, and held in the public space is a powerful way to allow people to be critically engaged within the realm of the community, and these ground-breaking artists were literally on the front lines of brining this practice to China, producing some of the most relevant, challenging and iconic works of the era.
Outside the watchful gaze of the authorities, they hosted many influential performance events, using their own bodies as subject and medium. Such an approach was expeditious for artists living in near-poverty, but also gave their works bluntly visceral quality that resonates to this day. Artists from this group included such notable figures as Zhang Huan, Ma Liuming, Cang Xin, Zhu Ming, and Rong Rong. Responding to the rapid modernisation facing their nation and their own feelings of disenfranchisement, their contemporaries in the field of painting gravitated towards oblique and highly personal symbolic styles that allowed them to critically address and reflect upon their changing environment. This coterie of performance-minded artists pursued a more interventionist and confrontational ethic, inspired in part by their derelict living circumstances as they sought to disrupt the cultural conservatism and complacency surrounding them, and which ironically often made them even less accessible to a broad audience. The staging of these performances, and their resulting photographs, then are all that remains of this audacious and unique period.
Often performing nude and sometimes at the risk of physical harm, these artists sought to radically upend taken-for granted notions of decorum, society and aesthetic experience. Even after the eventual destruction of the village and expulsion of the artists, a reliance of the body as prop, symbol and medium remains consistent throughout these artist's works. As with Zhang Huan's iconic and haunting Family Tree , featured in the Evening sale (Lot 2032), or his manipulation of his features in Skin (Lot 2452) into a series of absurdist expressions and meaningless semaphores, Zhang continues to rely on his own self-image as a motif to engage and subvert the representation of the body, the figure and the individual. As he has stated, "The body is a proof of identity and also a kind of language." For Zhang Huan in particular, as his career became increasingly international in scope, the language of the body was also one that shifted in its contextual registers. In Zhang's museum-based projects and performances, like Seeds of Hamburg produced for the exhibition of the same title, where Zhang was covered in sunflower seeds and surrounded by doves, serves as martyr, victim and liberator (Lot 2454). Similarly, Ma Liuming, whose earliest works exploited his own gender-ambiguous features, has extrapolated his experiences in the realm of performances into a series of symbolic self-portraits in different life stages, his features abstracted into an elusive state of transformation and becoming.
Many artists come to Beijing from provinces all over China to this day. The works of the East Village artists recall a distinct moment in time and essential period in the development of Chinese contemporary art. The documentation of the performances is the only remains of the village's artistic legacy, a legacy of audacious, risky and idealistic art-making, and one that was created before the hope of a viable career as an independent artist seemed within the realm of possibility. Performance art is a medium that foregrounds fundamental questions about the human condition that can be visually and conceptually composed, and held in the public space is a powerful way to allow people to be critically engaged within the realm of the community, and these ground-breaking artists were literally on the front lines of brining this practice to China, producing some of the most relevant, challenging and iconic works of the era.