Male Body Fatigue

Male Body Fatigue Lesley Sanderson Conroy/Sanderson. Meantime, video projection, 00. Photo by Sasha Su-Ling Welland. Courtesy of the artists. ome of the most iconic images in recent contemporary art have come from the documentary photographs of Chinese performance artists of mainland China. My Sresponse to the photographs of these performances comes from the particular position of a British-based artist practicing in the West. Like the majority of other viewers of seminal Chinese performances, I have access to most of these works only through documentary evidence. My interest arises out of shared themes that have concerned my own artistic practice for the past two decades, although my approach is very different. As a Chinese-British artist, I have spent the last twenty-three years engaged with making art that takes the Chinese female figure as its central concern. My particular engagement has been in how the Chinese female body might convey readings of power or vulnerability and the role that the gaze and spectatorship plays within the construction of these meanings. Although I am not a performance artist, all my work involves myself working performatively in order to construct pieces where the subject (or subjects) perform scenarios of agency or its lack. My own art generally embodies some negotiation of power between the viewer and the viewed. For the past ten years I have worked collaboratively with the British artist, Neil Conroy, in order to question and confound readings of gender and race. 78 It is from this context that I reflect on the images of performances of an extreme nature that arose out of China in the 1990s, examining them through the filter of race and gender. My intention is to examine these performances generally rather than specifically, and to offer a critique of this significant and radical way of depicting the Chinese subject. It is striking that writing on performance art coming out of China seldom touches on the discourses of race, gender, class and sexuality, with the possible exception of Ma Liuming, whose naked, feminized male body in the Fen-Ma Liuming series has been written about in the West. I am interested in how the reading of these works changes when it travels across cultural boundaries and how its reception in the West points to a continued “Otherization” of the Chinese body. When such an Otherization is combined with a particular view of masculinity, dominated by cruelty and endurance, there is a continuation of traditional perceptions of the Chinese subject held by the West. China in the 1990s saw an increase in artists who used their bodies as a way of commenting on their lives in a culture that was changing at an unprecedented pace; a culture where one’s position in society and all aspects of life were being challenged. Performance artists used their bodies as a way of exploring the personal in relation to the social, commenting on the extreme political climate and voicing a critical position within Chinese society. What was important was the link between the experience of the body in culture and the environment. It was in the late 1990s that performance art saw a particular emphasis on the body experiencing cruelty and endurance as a commentary on the repressive ideology experienced in China. Thomas Berghuis comments that, “Perhaps these cruel social and political situations can be traced back to what the Chinese critic Wang Nanming has called the ‘historical tradition of ruffianism’ in China: ‘that is to say, the tradition of continuing to violate human rights in a society that has no human rights in the first place.’”1 Peng Yu and Sun Yuan and others have spoken about cruelty being a way of conduct for the Chinese. In an interview with Ai Weiwei, Sun Yuan speaks about an attitude to violence in China, “Chinese people all share this tendency towards violence, so it’s easy to find common ground. I think this kind of violence, especially in China, is quite common. It seems like these disgusting things don’t happen overseas. This kind of violence is easily understood to Chinese people, but foreigners think it is hard to understand.” Peng Yu adds, “I think in foreign countries violence is hidden under humanism. Maybe their violence is buried deeper, and it’s worse. It won’t be as easy to read as that in China.”2 These comments demonstrate how different cultures relate differently to cruelty and the violation of the body. Sun Yuan’s comment foregrounds cruelty as a normal part of life in China, which also relates to Wang Nanming’s comment on the ruffian, a cruel and brutal figure that the Chinese are familiar with. Underlying Wang’s remark concerning the lack of human rights in China is the possibility of a Chinese philosophical attitude towards the body, which deviates from popular Western notions of personal freedom and morality based on a humanist tradition. By acknowledging that violence also occurs elsewhere, Peng Yu insinuates that it is not only a characteristic of Chinese people; rather, it is dealt with differently by other societies, who deny and conceal it. According to Berghuis, for the Chinese performance artist the physical and mental aspects of the self are understood as being equal parts of the whole, both mind and body requiring the other; this whole is never seen as divorced from its social context. He calls this the “lived body,” or the entirety of a person as the social, cultural, and physical environment shapes him or her. It is based on the 79 Yang Zhichao, Planting Grass, 000, performance. Courtesy of the artist. Chinese notion of the “body as process, one that brings our corporeal existence into contact with the entire universe.”3 This is different from the mind/body separation of Cartesian dualism more familiar in the West. In this light these performances can be seen as an exploration of the cycles of life and death, with pain and cruelty a part of the dynamic. In speaking about extreme performance art, Yang Zhichao has said, “spiritual numbness is also a form of violence.”4 He goes on to talk about his performance Planting Grass, where an assistant planted pieces of grass onto his back without local anaesthetic: “I remember that at the live performance of Planting Grass a reporter asked, ‘are you personally really suffering so much?’ To tell you the truth, not only was I not suffering, on the contrary, I felt at peace with my life. What I originally expressed was the sense of responsibility and endurance that we in our lives should not try to avoid as we develop, and also as well as a sense of hope in life. What life has not gone through blood and the pain of labour? In a senseless atmosphere where everyone is temporarily laughing and joking, this method of seeking extremes definitely has the effect of sobering people up. You certainly can’t let a whole nation of people go around grinning like idiots.”5 Yang appears to be speaking about the nobleness of suffering and the way that, through enduring pain, one is better equipped to understand the human condition, as if pain were a window onto transcendency. His quote suggests that he privileges suffering over and above the transience and superficiality of pleasure. He understands that violence has the capacity to stir the audience and by implication to jolt a wider audience out of complacency. The point is that images of cruelty are by nature direct; they communicate an act at a primal level. Yang recognizes this when he speaks about the ability for the extreme to cut through the trivial and sober up, and therefore to reveal things as they are. Many photographs of performances from China haunt and unsettle, and the written accounts of the work often provide uncomfortable reading. In the West, I think we are uncertain how to read them, which stems from our different philosophical traditions. It would seem obvious that the international art world might not be exposed adequately to the ideological motivations of performances that use cruelty or the philosophical underpinnings that are deeply embedded in the Chinese psyche. Without these tools, how are we to read photographs of the performances? 80 Zhang Huan, 25mm Threading Steel, 99, performance, Beijing. Courtesy of the artist. I’d suggest that a Western reading is affected by its legacy of Western humanism, Christian iconography, and colonial history. Chinese performance artists are very aware of the general interest in images of violence. They understand the visuality of their enactments and are adept at presenting themselves in front of an audience (whether actual or secondary) in a meaningful if often contentious manner. They understand that what they are engaged in is spectacle, something being watched and consumed by the live audience as well as the viewer of the photograph. These artists have placed great importance on photographic documentation of their performances. The photograph acts as a witness to a historical moment, a re-presentation of the political and social changes happening in China articulated through the body of the performing artist. The photograph records what has previously occurred, which is viewed later by another audience that might have a different but as significant a relationship with the work as the viewer of the live event. The photographs are crystallized and made iconic through the photographer’s editing. What happens when these photographs travel, how are they interpreted elsewhere? Readings are culturally specific. The process of translating what is unknown results in a shift of meaning and the possibility that the photograph can be read in unintended ways.

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