Male Body Fatigue

Lesley Sanderson

Conroy/Sanderson. Meantime, video projection, 2004. 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 . 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 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 , 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 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 , Planting Grass, 2000, 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 , 25mm Threading Steel, 1995, performance, . 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 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.

Susan Sontag writes about how photographs objectify their subjects and turn people into representations that can be possessed. She writes about how the most graphic representations of bodies in distress are those that seem most foreign. “The more remote or exotic the place, the more likely we are to have full frontal views of the dead and dying. . . . This journalistic custom inherits the centuries-old practice of exhibiting exotic—that is, colonized—human beings.” She continues, “for the other, even when not an enemy, is regarded only as someone to be seen, not someone (like us) who also sees.”6

Although the motivation for making these images of performance differs from that of a photojournalist taking photographs of war, the reception that these performance photographs receive in the West is similar. The photograph objectifies, and especially so if the subject is Other and regarded “only to be seen.” The West is used to being shown images of people from exotic lands engaged with acts that “offend” through displays of violence and savagery. There is a certain

81 amount of pleasure in seeing images of a barbarous nature, for it is an acknowledgement of the West’s supposed “civilized” and therefore superior status. The Chinese performance artists who privilege the photography of their work are unwittingly tapping into our habit of seeing. We might have some knowledge that these performances are concerned with the individual in relation to a particular social and political context, but largely they reiterate notions of the Other.

Unlike Chinese artists in the diaspora, for artists from China the exploration of being Other appears to have little relevance, as Lin Yilin articulates in an interview with Ai Weiwei. Lin says that “the majority of artists in China have not felt the crisis of existence in the position of the Other.”7

It is the West that postulates as Other anyone who is at odds from Western institutions. Whilst this might not occur within China, when the Chinese subject, or its He Yunchang, Eyesight Test, 2003, performance, Beijing. Courtesy of the artist. representation, is viewed in the West, racially distinctive features clearly mark the body. Through classifying those that deviate from the master narrative as Other, the West constructs and maintains its power structures. The continued exoticization of the unknown is in keeping with a historical stereotyping of the Chinese as the Yellow Peril of imperialist nightmares, with the corresponding associations of violence and menace. Without the original context of how to view these performance works, the photographs become detached from their original cultural context and motivation, which means that the West becomes disconnected from a deeper understanding of the works. The Western audience views Chineseness simultaneously with the cruelty of the act depicted, and the embodiment of cruelty becomes a motif and another way of classifying, Othering, and exoticizing the body. This reception perpetuates the classification of images as Other within the Orientalist tradition. In this way the artists perform a racialized Chineseness in relation to Orientalist models of the savage.

The West’s fascination with these photographs and accounts of extreme performances might well be interpreted as an insidious way of restating superiority and power over those less “civilized.” Alternatively, it could be an attempt to delve into the interiority of the self to understand the stranger or Other within ourselves. Julia Kristeva writes about how the Other is a construction of that which we do not understand and fear within ourselves. We try to deny a part of ourselves that we do not understand or want to accept. We name someone Other when we find him or her threatening, but actually it is a part of ourselves that we have difficulty coming to terms with. For Kristeva, difference is an internal condition. With Kristeva in mind, looking at images of performances that use violence and extremes can be understood as a way of looking at a part of ourselves that we are troubled with because it signifies cruelty and the uncivilized—for example, behaviour that we associate with deviance, criminality, or immorality, or as symptomatic of systems and communities that have broken down. Perhaps we learn that these artists are willing to examine themselves, including their demons, in a manner that we in the West avoid.

82 He Yunchang, Casting, 2004, performance, Tokyo Art Projects, Beijing. Courtesy of the artist.

It is clear that the majority of Chinese performance artists (and artists generally) who receive national and international recognition are male. Gender as a critical tool to understand this work is noticeable for its absence. Borrowing from feminist theory dealing with the gaze, the Chinese body is here fetishized and objectified for the gaze to posses. Here, the male body is subjected to acts that he heroically endures. The male body, whether buried in earth, encased in concrete, suspended from the ceiling, branded, or beaten, is made vulnerable by these self-inflicted torments. The central point of the performance is the artist’s ability to withstand and endure such onslaughts to the body and to be able to walk away from them after the event. The performance is a symbolic enactment of pain and suffering. It is not a genuine situation of the actual violation of one body by another; rather, it is voluntary and self-inflicted. The value of the artistic gesture is in the fact that the artist chooses to put himself through the pain. This signals the authenticity of his intention and the artist’s need to comment on humanity, its suffering, and the lack of agency within real life situations. We interpret the willingness of the artist to take on the burden of suffering within the symbolic act of the performance as a heroic and significant act. It claims the potential of the individual’s agency to stand apart from the collective and demonstrate one’s accountability.

Applying Judith Butler’s theory that gender is a process and that we perform our gender rather than it being a biological given, we can see in these performances that masculinity is being played out and “performed.” The emphasis on physical strength is historically part of Chinese patriarchal culture, which is here resoundingly manifested. Depictions of cruelty and the figure suffering continue the trope of the masculine by exaggerating the attributes of masculinity through enactments of strength.

The performances privilege masculine extreme acts as a means of artistic articulation and fetishize the self-image to a point of the pornographic. The photographs are of fit, able, and lean naked or partially naked male bodies that we are able to view voyeuristically, to consume and enjoy.

83 He Chengyao, 99 Needles, 2002, performance. Courtesy of the artist.

The bodies are seen in acts of self-violation, potentially exaggerating the pornographic reading. Added to this, they are also Chinese male bodies that are engaged in cruel acts. It is the adding of the figure of the cruel Chinese to the male figure that allows the perpetuation of the stereotype of the unruly, uncivilized Other. Although the male figure might be presented as vulnerable and passively taking on acts bestowed onto his body, his endurance is an active resistance to the conditions being measured out to him. They differ from the passivity of the traditional female figure within Western representation, for he is in control of his body, the performance, and its parameters, and, to a large extent, the photographic document.

84 Performance artists see themselves as playing a central role in the formation of a modern China. Their works challenge moral codes of behaviour in society by making evident the line between civility and barbarism. Their works are an embodiment of the conflicts posed by the political and social situation that they find themselves in. But in the course of circulating to different audiences, particularly in the West, their works can encounter other readings. Whilst these international audiences acknowledge the political imperative to comment and the ideological content of these works, they can be differently interpreted because of Western readings of race and gender.

The problem facing any Chinese artist who uses him- or herself as subject or object is complex, because the work’s reception will often be racialized internationally. Those exhibiting abroad should consider this, even if they do not deal with it directly. I believe that “cruel” is too easily employed as a way of categorizing and exoticizing the Chinese male subject.

It seems to me that there are more female examples in contemporary Chinese literature than in the Chinese visual arts. We hear about the Chinese female protagonist through biographies and literary narratives, whereas there is a relative absence of female perspective within the visual arts. It is undoubted that female artists make a valuable contribution, and one thinks of He Chengyao, Kan Xuan, Cao Fei, Chen Lingyang and others, but they are relatively small in number and rarely reach the heights of critical acclaim and exposure awarded to their male counterparts. I think it is problematic that we are exposed to such a patriarchal view, especially when these and other female positions have not been given proper space and support. We are currently witnessing an increase of visibility of the Chinese body within the international art world, but this is not necessarily a good thing if those representations reflect a homogenous and one-dimensional view of Chinese subjectivity. Although I find much of this performance work genuinely engaging and challenging, I believe we are presented with a limited view of masculinity, which continues a patriarchal legacy rather than calling it into question. There seems to be a lack of nuance in relation to how gender is being addressed, even a lack of awareness that masculinity is always implicit within the work when the male artist employs his own body.

Is this the death of the vitality of these types of performance works in China? Shu Yang suggests this when he says, “the emergence of extreme tendencies in performance art was in some respects a sign that performance art’s creativity had reached a dead end.”8 If this is so, one hopes that from this ending will arise a multiplicity of Chinese subject positions that include varying models of masculinity and, crucially, equal space for female subjectivity.

Notes 1 Thomas Berghuis, (: Timezone 8 Limited, 2006), 115. I have found Thomas Berghuis’s research particularly useful in understanding the historical trajectory of performance as well as discovering a range of ways of interpreting the phenomena of cruelty within it. 2 Sun Yuan and Peng Yu, “Interview with Ai Weiwei,” Chinese Artists, Texts and Interviews: Chinese Contemporary Art Awards (CCAA), 1998–2002 (Hong Kong: Timezone 8 Limited, 2002), 23–24. 3 Berghuis, 37. 4 Yang Zhichao emailed the author the following details about the Planting Grass performance: “Time and Place of Performance: At 10:00 a.m. on 5 November 2000, second floor of No. 1133, Suzhou Road, where Fuck off was on show. I made an operation platform, 2000 x 800 x 780 mm, where an operating scalpel was incised into my left scapula by a surgeon. Without any anesthesia, the scalpel made two cuts, 1 centimeter deep and 1 centimeter wide. Afterwards, grass picked at the banks of the Suzhou River was planted into the two cuts. The performance lasted for 45 minutes.” 5 Yang Zhichao, Chinese Artists, Texts and Interviews: Chinese Contemporary Art Awards (CCAA) 1998–2002, 70–72. 6 Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others (United Kingdom: Hamish Hamilton, 2003), 63–65. 7 Lin Yilin, “Interview with Ai Weiwei,” Chinese Artists, Texts and Interviews: Chinese Contemporary Art Awards (CCAA) 1998–2002, 121. 8 Shu Yang, “Performance Art and Live Art in China. Why do ‘Live Art’ in China?” in China Live: Reflections on Contemporary Performance Art (United Kingdom: Chinese Arts Centre, 2005), 18.

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