Chan Shing Kwan Public Displays of Affliction: On Zhang Huan’s 12m 2

I had discovered that my body could become my language, it was the closest thing to who I was and it allowed me to become known to others…. It allowed me to express some very deep emotions coming from different places. — Zhang Huan1

Zhang Huan, 12m2, 1994, magine your repugnance performance, . Courtesy of Zhang Huan Studio, upon witnessing myriad flies . Ilanding on the skin of an artist’s unclothed body; imagine the persistent anguish of being confined in a public lavatory on a sweltering midsummer day, and attempt to enunciate the sounds of aversion as the stench of excrement permeates the air. Such combinations of gruesome physical affliction and extreme psychological endurance, which were all realized in a single action titled 12m2 (1994), epitomize the early abject art performances orchestrated by Chinese artist Zhang Huan. First in and later in the global art arena, Zhang Huan daringly carried out intense art performances between 1993 and 2005 into which he unleashed personal, social, and political distress by pushing his body and psyche to the limits of tolerance. As Zhang Huan’s statement above highlights, the artist’s seemingly over-the-top performance works were in fact genuinely intended as a means to convey a thought or a feeling through a series of staged gestures and decisive actions. Although the number of viewers present at his early acts of fierce abjection was tiny, the artist quickly established his reputation through the photographs and video documentation of his performances that circulated in transnational exhibitions during the 1990s and 2000s.

Between 1993 and 1998, Zhang Huan presented the majority of his performance works in a now demolished bohemian community called Beijing East Village, which was located on the outskirts of the capital city of China. During that time span, Zhang Huan and other like-minded artists such as Ma Liuming and Zhu Ming staged a diverse range of controversial performances. These performers lived like the penniless artists of New

Vol. 17 No. 1 97 York’s East Village in the 1980s, such Zhang Huan, Seeds of Hamburg, 2002, performance, that their bodies became their major Hamburg Kunstverein. Courtesy of Zhang Huan medium of artistic expression. Studio, Shanghai. Whether in real time or through documentation, the unconventional displays of Zhang Huan’s own body provided the context of his artistic practices. His international career was launched when he immigrated to New York in 1998, and between then and 2005 his performances became increasingly choreographed and included more participants, with the artist performing acts at various locations around the world including Seattle (1999), Santiago (2001), Hamburg (2002), Sydney (2004), and Rome (2005).2 After Zhang Huan abandoned in 2005, the artist founded an art studio in Shanghai, where his focus has been to embrace the creation of tangible artworks such as sculpture, installation, and painting. Although he ended his performance phase, Zhang Huan’s sensational acts have never left the limelight. Photographs, and at times documentary videos, of his performances continue to be disseminated through the Internet, art galleries, and auction houses. In 2014, Family Tree (2000), a series of nine photographs that document a gradual obscuring of Zhang Huan’s face with inked Chinese idioms until it is completely blackened, was sold at Christie’s for USD $642,591, nearly triple its estimate. Recently, his performance pieces like Family Tree and To Add One Meter to an Anonymous Mountain (1995), together with works by other contemporary Chinese artists like Ai Weiwei and , were featured in Hong Kong’s M+ Sigg Collection: Four Decades of Chinese Contemporary Art in 2016.

Zhang Huan, Family Tree, 2000, nine chromogenic prints, 56.5 x 43.8 cm each. Courtesy of Zhang Huan Studio, Shanghai.

98 Vol. 17 No. 1 Zhang Huan, To Add One Writers and art critics have made Meter to an Anonymous Mountain, 1995, performance, various attempts to interpret Zhang Beijing. Courtesy of Zhang Huan Studio, Shanghai. Huan’s art performances. Notably, many of them analyze Zhang Huan’s acts based on the contexts of cultural identity or so-called “Chineseness.” For instance, art historian Paul Gladston remarks that Zhang Huan and other artists in Beijing East Village developed and recorded performance-based practices, which “focused on questions of identity.”3 In 2013, Agnes Hsu directed a four-part documentary series titled “Chineseness,” which was broadcast on Discovery Channel and aimed to examine the idea of “a renaissance in Chinese identity through the lives and work of four prominent contemporary Chinese artists,” Zhang Huan among them.4 Zhang Huan himself has seemed disappointed by this hyper- attention to the cultural identity or “Chineseness” of artists from China, which he finds symptomatic of the state of contemporary within the larger art world: “When Westerners discuss contemporary art in China, they talk about ‘China’ first and ‘art’ later.”5 Indeed, many critics and writers have been inclined to comment on his work primarily as the work of a Chinese artist; thus, only limited literature exists about Zhang Huan’s performances beyond the discussion of cultural identity. In order to better understand Zhang’s performances, this essay intends to explore these works from a theoretical and historical perspective.

At first glance, the title of this essay, “Public Displays of Affliction,” appears to be an innocuous pun, a tongue-in-cheek play on words. However, this title also references two phenomena of the artist’s performance-based practices. First, the term “public displays” refers to the ways Zhang Huan has displayed his body in his art performances. Second, the word “affliction” indicates the agony, affliction, and abjection he endured for his performance acts. Here I focus on Zhang Huan’s 1994 performance 12m2, and I examine the roles that affliction and abjection play in his performances as well as their secondary representations. By arguing that his performances are also legible particularly through the theoretical trope of abjection, I am suggesting that “cultural identity” and “Chineseness” are not adequate analytical tools through which to achieve a more comprehensive reflection of Zhang Huan’s art performances, as well as works by other contemporary Chinese artists.

Enacted inside a public toilet in Beijing East Village, 12m2 is likely Zhang Huan’s most famous (or infamous) work of art. It was documented both by video and photographs. In a widely reproduced monochrome photograph of 12m2, Zhang Huan juxtaposes his lean young figure and austere features with the unsanitary setting of a public lavatory. A slick substance that attracts swarming flies covers every inch of the artist’s upper-body, including his clean-shaven head, stoic face, and resolute mouth. The attractant is later revealed to be a sticky amalgam of honey and fish sauce. Writing on the wall reads “Please pay attention to the public hygiene” (请讲究公共卫生), in sharp contrast to the artist, who is engulfed by buzzing flies—common vectors of disease. The photo-shoot was arranged by Ai Weiwei, who was at times stopping by Beijing East Village, and the photographer Rong Rong.6

Vol. 17 No. 1 99 According to Rong Rong, Zhang Huan Zhang Huan, 12m2, 1994, performance, Beijing. Photo: remained unflinching through the entire Rong Rong. Courtesy of Zhang Huan Studio, Shanghai. performance. Even when flies began to land on his nude body, he still sat as motionless as a sculpture.7 Approximately one hour later, Zhang Huan stood up and sauntered out of the stall.8 The artist walked toward a pond behind the toilet and went straight into the cold water. A rarely reproduced series of photographs demonstrate the culmination of his performance; as the water gets deeper and deeper, Zhang Huan’s naked body slowly disappears, leaving only ripples on the surface of the pond. 12m2 was no doubt an agonizing and abhorrent experience, one that suggests abjection. In a literal sense, the term abjection means the state of experiencing something unpleasant, debasing, or traumatic to the maximum degree. In her book Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, psychoanalyst Julia Kristeva examines the visceral terror and allure of abjection. She views abjection as an ill-defined feeling of repulsion:

Zhang Huan, 12m2, 1994, performance, Beijing. Photo: Rong Rong. Courtesy of Zhang Huan Studio, Shanghai.

There looms within abjection, one of those violent, dark revolts of being, directed against a threat that seems to emanate from an exorbitant outside or inside, ejected beyond the scope of the possible, the tolerable, the thinkable. . . . Unflaggingly, like an inescapable boomerang, a vortex of summons and repulsion places the one haunted by it literally beside himself. 9

In simpler terms, abjection is a bleak state of mind, a primal sense of detestation and aversion. In this regard, Zhang Huan’s exercise in 12m2 can be considered an abject art performance, as the artist underwent immense physical and psychological distress purely for the sake of his work.

In this performance, he also shared the abject experience of revulsion with his audience. While Zhang Huan was the only one to be covered in a liquid “fly

100 Vol. 17 No. 1 attractant,” his viewers, including Rong Rong and Ai Weiwei, also endured the repugnant setting of the toilet as well as the swarming flies. As Rong Rong recalled in a letter to his sister, he too suffered from this horrendous experience and went through an unsettling emotional state of repulsion:

11:30 am yesterday. . . . In a few minutes, swarms of flies started covering his body. I had put on a mouth cover that I had prepared the day before. You know how stinky that public toilet is. On top of that, it was more than 38 degrees centigrade yesterday. I don’t know how I managed to take pictures in those conditions; all I can remember was the noise of the flies and the sound of the shutter lens. . . . Holding my camera, I felt that I couldn’t breathe, it felt like the end of life.10

Immanuel Kant (1724–1804), dedicating but a few sections of his renowned Critique of Judgment (1790) to the ugly in contrast to his extensive investigation of the beautiful, praised the critical function of art to transform real-life ugliness into something that is visually appealing: “Where fine art evidences its superiority is in the beautiful descriptions it gives of things that in nature would be ugly or displeasing. The Furies, diseases, devastations of war, and the like, can be very beautifully described, may even be represented in pictures.”11 However, Kant emphasized that there was “one kind of ugliness alone that cannot be transformed into aesthetic delight and consequently artistic beauty, namely, that which excites disgust.” 12 Clearly, Kant did not oppose disgust on ethical grounds; instead, he argued that our interest in that which sickens us could never be aesthetically pleasing. 12m2, in which both the artist and the audience bore the disturbance of flies, the foul smell of the environment as well as the terrible heat of summer, operates in accordance with Kant’s claim about disgust as something that can never be beautiful. Similarly, one of Kant’s contemporaries, German philosopher Moses Mendelssohn (1729–1786), argued that disgust as a repellent sensation breaks through the oppositional dichotomy of art and nature, real and imaginary, and, hence, unsettles the condition for the possibility of aestheticizing disgust.13 In 12m2, the abject is still abject and the repulsive is still repulsive, even though Zhang Huan’s performance of such abjection has been elevated to the level of fine art.

Because of the abject and at times repulsive nature of Zhang Huan’s performances, it is understandable that many people remain critical of his work. Attacks on these performances often include statements that call into question the mental state of the artist, derisively assigning him epithets such as “madman” or “sick-minded.”14 Some even questioned whether his works were sincere. Art critic Ellen Pearlman labeled 12m2 and his other performances “shock art.”15 The term “shock art” has a negative connotation, as it is generally adopted to categorize works of art that generate “shock for shock’s sake,” contrary to works that are genuine in intention. “Shock for shock’s sake” plays on the French credo “l’art pour l’art,” or “art for art’s sake” in English, which expresses a belief that the intrinsic value of art can and should be removed from having any particular meaning. However, as Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) polemically argued, “art for art’s sake” does not exist:

Vol. 17 No. 1 101 L’art pour l’art—the struggle against purpose in art is always a struggle against the moralizing tendency in art, against its subordination to morality. L’art pour l’art means, “the devil take morality!” But even this enmity betrays the overwhelming force of prejudice. Once you take away from art the purpose of preaching morality and improving humanity, the result is still a far cry from art as completely purposeless, aimless, senseless. 16

Far from being “shock art,” which produces no meaning and exists only to create shock, Zhang Huan was able to unleash personal, social, and political distress, which, in turn, also functioned as symbolic critiques by executing abject art performances. In fact, the art performances at Beijing East Village followed the growing attention by experimental artists who swapped “art for art’s sake” for a new type of embodied experience.

Zhang Huan has stated that many of his performances were carried out to directly reflect upon his personal experiences at Beijing East Village. The village, called Danshanzhuang, and populated mainly by migrant workers, was informally renamed by the group of artists who were residing in the community at that time, including Zhang Huan.17 In an interview with RoseLee Goldberg, Zhang Huan mentioned that he became aware of New York’s East Village scene by reading two books, New Wave of Modern Art (1987), compiled and edited by Yang Chihung, and Conversations with the Masters (1993), edited by Chen Tong and Yang Xiaoyan.18 After perusing these two art historical accounts, Zhang Huan decided to distance himself from traditional art practices such as painting and began to look for a new form of artistic expression; he eventually settled upon performance art. As Zhang Huan recalled, the name Beijing East Village was inspired by the East Village in Manhattan to express the artists’ respect and admiration for New York’s historical avant-garde.19 In Art in China, Craig Clunas considers Beijing East Village a “self-consciously bohemian and marginal artistic enclave.”20 From Paris’s Pigalle in the early twentieth century to New York’s Brooklyn in the early twenty-first century, bohemia has occurred over and over again in industrial cities across the world, holding within itself a radical spirit that engenders its own cycle of occurrence, innovation, and disappearance.21 The establishment of a bohemian community depends on the formation of a marginal artistic community that declares itself a replacement to a former avant-garde and is reborn as an urban arts district in which the spaces and lives of artists are displayed and consumed and where, eventually, its demise can be perpetually mourned. Just as New York’s East Village replaced the gentrified Greenwich Village, Beijing’s East Village was subsequently superseded by the now widely renowned (and also gentrified) 798 Art District.

Today, visitors to Beijing can no longer find Beijing East Village, which has simply vanished from the cityscape due to rapid urban development.22 The once-thriving artistic community “village” now exists only in photographs, as well as in textual accounts in which the “villagers” have documented their experiences there. However, Beijing’s East Village used to have a strong influence on its artists-in-residence; at that time, Beijing East Village was

102 Vol. 17 No. 1 a village in the true sense of the word. A 1993 photograph by Rong Rong shows a slightly crooked, hand painted signboard that reads “北京東村 Beijing East Village” situated on a mound of trash against a background of unadorned village houses. According to Wu Hung, closer inspection of the photograph reveals posters on the wall advertising clandestine folk remedy for venereal diseases.23 Karen Smith, an art critic and writer based in Beijing, described the environment of Beijing East Village in the early 1990s as thus: “Waste accumulates by the side of the small ponds. This pollutes the water, generating noxious fumes in the summer. Raw sewage flows directly into the water. Slothful, threadbare dogs roam the narrow lanes between houses.”24 In an interview, Zhang Huan recalled how he derived the idea of 12m2 from his quotidian life in Beijing East Village:

12m2 is the area of the public toilets that are used every day in China. One day after lunch, I went to the toilet as usual. The sun had just come out following a rainstorm, but there was no place to stand in the toilet for it was flooded. I had to bike to another public toilet in the village. It was relatively cleaner. When I stepped in, thousands of flies swarmed toward me and I still had to squat down. This was my life, and no one could experience it but me. I was determined to make artworks about my life and suddenly came up with the idea of 12m2.25

Beijing East Village itself was an abject environment. Kristeva refers to the abject subject as a “deject who places [oneself], separates [oneself], situates [oneself], and therefore strays instead of getting his bearings, desiring, belonging, or refusing.”26 Without a sense of orientation, the abject glides through what one might call “a space of anxiety” where the boundaries between the internal and external world are constantly intimidated by the invasion of the abject and where no true objects of desire can exist.27 The horrible living conditions experienced by Zhang Huan catalyzed his extreme endurance-based performances and formed the backdrop for these acts, as the visceral distress of thousands of flies swarming around the artist motivated him to execute this work.

Zhang Huan, Original Sound, 1995, performance, Beijing. Photo: Rong Rong. Courtesy of Zhang Huan Studio, Shanghai.

Vol. 17 No. 1 103 The sickening elements of 12m2—flies, honey, fish sauce, sweat, filth—as manifestations of abject materiality bring to mind another performance orchestrated by Zhang Huan, Original Sound (1995). In this piece, he lay under a highway overpass and emptied a jar full of earthworms into his mouth and let them squirm inside his face. A critical purpose of abject art is its function as symbolic criticism of the human condition, and, as Theodor Adorno pointed out, in the “penchant of modern art for the nauseating and physically revolting . . . the critical material motif shows through: In its autonomous forms art decries domination.”28 In their microcosm of ongoing social conflict and struggle, both 12m2 and Original Sound can be viewed as art performances that were enacted to demonstrate the artist’s discontent with the poor living conditions of himself and others.

2 Just as in 12m , insects and worms, Damien Hirst, A Thousand Years, 1990, glass, steel, both of which in Chinese are referred silicone rubber, painted MDF, Insect-O-Cutor, cow’s head, to as chong 蟲, were once again blood, flies, maggots, metal dishes, cotton wool, sugar and adopted as part of his performance water, 2075 x 4000 x 2150 mm. in Original Sound, in which the artist had even more intimate contact with such creatures. The chong in both of these performances call to mind Damien Hirst’s controversial installation A Thousand Years (1990), which features a severed cow’s head and thousands of flies contained in a glass box. The box itself functions as a self-contained ecosystem: Maggots hatch inside the container, mature into flies, and feed on the cow’s head. In Hirst’s conception, flies symbolize people, and the closed system mirrors our world with its ecosystem fully exposed. The enclosed toilet in Zhang Huan’s 12m2, similar to Hirst’s self-contained life- cycle, harbours flies that feed on the honey and fish sauce, with Zhang Huan himself providing the nourishing and abject sustenance in this environment. Also similar to Hirst’s installation, Zhang Huan reflects upon the meaning of life; in an interview he describes his experience in 12m2:

I just felt that everything began to vanish from my sight. Life seemed to be leaving me far in the distance. I had no concrete thought except that my mind was completely empty. I could only feel my body, more and more flies landing and crawling over my nose, eyes, ears, forehead, every part of me. I could feel them the liquid on my body. Some were stuck but did not stop eating. I could even tell that they were more interested in the fish liquid than the honey because there were more flies on the left part of my body, where that liquid was. The very concept of life was then for me the simple experience of the body.29

According to Kristeva, the abject “is Zhang Huan, Original Sound, 30 1995, performance, Beijing. death infecting life,” and both the Courtesy of Zhang Huan fish sauce, a condiment made from Studio, Shanghai. dead fish, and the disturbing flies, which were hatched on decaying organic matter, are representations of death and decay. Unlike Hirst, who intended to mirror the larger

104 Vol. 17 No. 1 world with his glass-box installation, Zhang Huan offered a direct reflection on people’s lives in Beijing East Village. Like the flies, which were stuck in the honey and fish sauce, Zhang Huan, as well as other Beijing East Village residents, were trapped in this unpleasant environment, as this place was an abject but relatively safe haven for these artists to carry out their pieces.

Why did Zhang Huan choose to incorporate chong in his performances? The artist has never specifically pointed out the significance of using insects in his acts. Chong are, of course, paradigmatic of the abject. Traditionally, insects are feared organisms that are often unwelcomed. It is also important to note the meanings associated with chong in post-Cultural Revolution China. During the Cultural Revolution, the ruling party compared capitalists and members of the bourgeoisie to insects. In the first rally of the Cultural Revolution in Tian’anmen in 1966, Lin Biao, by then a political frontrunner, powerfully proclaimed that “we have to destroy old thoughts, old culture, old customs, old habits of the exploiting class . . . We have to destroy the worms that destroy our people and remove the millstone around our legs.”31 In Chinese female writer Zong Pu’s post-Cultural Revolution Kafkaesque novella Who Am I? (1979), the protagonist, a scientist, returns to China after studying abroad, only to be labeled a counter-revolutionary traitor during the Cultural Revolution; eventually, she is metamorphosed into an insect that is loathed by others. In this regard, Zhang Huan may also have used chong in his performances in order to reflect upon the preposterous era of the Cultural Revolution, where people could all of a sudden become as despicable as an insect due to their background or social class.

While abjection can be a feeling of repulsion, Kristeva states that it is not the lack of “cleanliness or health that invokes this feeling, but the disregard for social order.”32 Kristeva considers abjection as a process that interferes with the normal coordination and functioning of social order because it openly refuses to comply with social boundaries, conditions, or rules. She ascribes such a process to the social expectation that we rigorously police ourselves to prevent evidence of private bodily functions such as vomit, blood, or excrement from becoming socially acknowledgeable or visible.33 As Kristeva commented: “refuse and corpses show me what I permanently thrust aside in order to live.”34 A lavatory is a designated space where people defecate, and human excretion, as with all things that are considered low, base, and unpleasant, should be carefully avoided and kept hidden from our vision. In the midst of performing 12m2, according to the artist, some villagers accidentally walked in during the course of the performance and looked surprised and embarrassed when they saw Zhang Huan carrying out his performance. They were shocked because they unexpectedly encountered him and were forced to confront abject manifestations that they normally might avoid; facing the abject is by nature a traumatic experience since it attacks the social order.35 In this sense, 12m2 maximized the power of performance art as a creative practice by obliterating the distance between artist and audience.

What are the implications for bodies that are irrevocably abject, as suggested by Zhang Huan’s performances? Offering a rather cynical perspective, in his article “Obscene, Abject, Traumatic,” art historian Hal Foster proclaimed that tendencies of abjection were ubiquitous in postmodernist artistic

Vol. 17 No. 1 105 currents during the 1980s and 90s. According to Foster, artistic representation traditionally serves a pacifying function as an “image/screen” —a function meant to mediate or negotiate between viewers and their devastating experiences of real the world.36 But in much postmodernist art this traditional mission is replaced by a wish to shock, achieved by “puncturing” the protective representational “image/screen.” Therefore, the “abject” becomes a legitimate, self-reflexive, and self-contained “strategy of perversion.” As Foster polemically declared, “the shit movement contemporary art may intend a symbolic reversal of the first step of civilization.”37

In a “project statement” for his performance, Zhang Huan connects this experience to a general “relationship between people and their environment” in China, where a large number of public lavatories in similar conditions continue to exist in cities and towns, concealed in dark alleys in the most densely populated areas and in the shadow of glamorous skyscrapers.38 His act thereby acknowledged a neglected subset of the population in China, including the artist himself, who were in a vulnerable position relative to the nation’s rapid growth, and who were yet to benefit from economic development and were still living in a substandard environment. The cathartic effects of tragedy can apply to the artist as well. As Zhang Huan explained in an interview: “[F]or me, after a performance, it is like a big stone is lifted from my heart. Every time it is like this and every time it is always different. . . . I need the feeling, this feeling close to my heart.”39 The concluding action in 12m2, in which the artist entered naked into the pond adjacent to the public toilet, cleaning the sticky liquid from his body and driving all the flies away, is by its very nature a purification. Here, he not only removed the physical contaminants, but also performed a mental purification. Abjection is only one of the many perspectives that can be employed to read Zhang Huan’s excruciating performances. By presenting the hitherto under-acknowledged relationship between the concept of abjection and the performance acts of Zhang Huan, this essay proposes contemporary Chinese performance art can be understood beyond the theoretical trope of cultural identity or “Chineseness.” Rather than discussing the artists’ creative efforts and the experimental aspects of the work, many writers on Chinese art devote their energies on revealing how contemporary Chinese artists are adept at evoking the specificities of “Chineseness,” as if the value of both artists and their work is simply a by-product of national/ cultural identity. To conclude, I will quote art critic Hon Hanru on the current state of scholarship on contemporary Chinese art:

For some Western writers, it is unacceptable to express the “Oriental mind” with the “Occidental” language of avant- garde art. The value and significance of a Chinese artist can only be legitimized through their use of “ink-wash” or “calligraphy.” . . . Of course, its result is the discrimination of the “other.” 40

Studies on Euro-American performance artists like and Marina Abramović are not always about “Americaness” or European cultural identity. We must ask, then, why contemporary Chinese artists are so often limited to a discussion of “Chineseness.”

106 Vol. 17 No. 1 Notes

1. RoseLee Goldberg, “RoseLee Goldberg in Conversation with Zhang Huan,” in Zhang Huan, eds. Yilma Dziewior, RoseLee Goldberg, and Robert Storr (London and New York: Phaidon, 2009), 19. 2. Melissa Chiu, “Altered Art: Zhang Huan,” in Zhang Huan: Altered States, ed. Melissa Chiu (New York and Milan: Charta, 2007), 13. 3. Paul Gladston, Contemporary Chinese Art: A Critical History (London: Reaktion Books, 2014), 204. 4. “Zhang Huan,” episode 2, Chineseness, dir. Agnes Hsu (Discovery Channel, 2013). 5. Amélia Mariani, “Zhang Huan’s Big Buddha: Ten Years Later,” Yishu: Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art 11, no. 4 (August, 2012), 56. 6. Wu Hung, Rong Rong’s East Village 1993–1998 (New York: Chambers Fine Art, 2003), 70. All of the images in this book were taken by Rong Rong, many of them of different artists’ performances. Rong Rong considers his photographs documenting these performances as works of art. 7. Ibid., 70. 8. Ibid. 9. Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982), 1. 10. Wu Hung, Rong Rong’s East Village 1993–1998, 70. 11. Immanuel Kant, Kant’s Critique of Aesthetic Judgment (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1911), 173. 12. Ibid., 135. Emphasis added. 13. Moses Mendelssohn, Philosophical Writings, trans. and ed. Daniel O. Dahlstrom (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 137–38. 14. Mariani, “Zhang Huan’s Big Buddha,” 59. 15. Ellen Pearlman, “Zhang Huan Altered States,” Brooklyn Rail, October 3, 2007, https://brooklynrail. org/2007/10/artseen/zhang-huan-altered-states/. 16. Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols, or How to Philosophize with a Hammer [1888], trans. Duncan Large (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 20. 17. Zhang Huan, “A Piece of Nothing,” in Zhang Huan: Altered States, ed. Melissa Chiu (New York and Milan: Charta, 2007), 57. 18. Goldberg, “RoseLee Goldberg in Conversation with Zhang Huan,” 16. 19. Zhang, “A Piece of Nothing,” 57. 20. Craig Clunas, Art in China (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 231. 21. Richard Florida, The Rise of the Creative Class: And How It’s Transforming Work, Leisure, Community and Everyday Life (New York: Basic Books, 2002), 10–12. 22. Wu Hung, Rong Rong’s East Village 1993–1998, 160. 23. Ibid., 18. 24. Karen Smith, “Rong Rong: Records of the Observer,” unpublished manuscript. Quoted in Wu Hung, Rong Rong’s East Village 1993–1998, 18. 25. Zhang Huan, “A Piece of Nothing,” 46. 26. Kristeva, Powers of Horror, 8. 27. Ibid., 11. 28. Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 49. 29. Zhijian Qian, “Performing Bodies: Zhang Huan, Ma Liuming, and Performance Art in China,” Art Journal 58, no. 2 (1999), 65–66. 30. Kristeva, Powers of Horror, 4. 31. Julia Kwong, Cultural Revolution in China’s Schools: May 1966–April 1969 (Stanford: Hoover Institution Press, 1988), 35. Emphasis added. 32. Kristeva, Powers of Horror, 4. 33. Ibid., 98. 34. Ibid., 3. 35. Ibid., 44. 36. Hal Foster, “Obscene, Abject, Traumatic,” October 78 (1996), 118. 37. In his article, Foster uses Cindy Sherman’s oeuvre to demonstrate that her pieces have moved across from early work of traditional “image/screen” to subsequent pieces that are “punctuated by close-ups of simulated damaged and/or dead body parts and sexual and/or excretory body parts respective.” To Foster, Sherman’s later work is an epitome of the “shit movement”—a term coined by Foster to describe the fascination with abjection. See Foster, “Obscene, Abject, Traumatic,” 110–118. 38. Ma Liuming, “Notes on Four Topics,” in Heipi Shu (Black Cover Book), eds. Ai Weiwei, Zeng Xiaojun, and Xu Bing (Beijing: self-published, 1994), 35. Quoted in Wu Hung, Rong Rong’s East Village 1993– 1998, 13. 39. Mary Jane Jacob, “In the Space of Art,” in Buddha Mind in Contemporary Art, eds. Jacquelynn Baas and Mary Jane Jacob (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2004), 243. 40. Hon Hanru, “Entropy, Chinese Artists, Western Art Institutions: A New Internationalism,” in Contemporary Chinese Art: Primary Documents, ed. Wu Hung (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2010), 365.

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