Performance in Art Museum

The mutual expansion of exhibition and performance in China

Content

Introduction

1.How Performance Art Develop in China

2.How Performance Art Interacts with Theatre Art and Exhibition Spaces

(1) The Interaction between Performance Art and Theatre Art within

the Space of Exhibitions

(2) The Interaction as an Extension of Art Work Outside of Exhibition

Space

3. The Changing Role of the Curator

Conclusion
Introduction

In 31 October, 2019, Trance, Tianzhuo Chen’s first solo exhibition in China, opened at Beijing M
Woods Art Museum. For the first three days after the opening, there are 12-hour performances in
the exhibition. In 2019, Inside-out Art Museum, Song Art Museum, Red Brick Art Museum and
other museums held a number of performance events. Art museums, which was only used as a
space for display, are gradually expending the functionality of the performance spaces in China.
Performances, has become an increasingly important part of the daily operation of art museums.1
Its role is not limited to artworks, but also serves as interactive activities and guide for exhibitions.

Tianzhuo Chen, Trance, Exhibition Spot, 2019

The traditional drama developed to the 1970s, tried to break the text-oriented creative model and
emphasized the independence and equality of various means of theatre art. Hans-Thies Lehmann
named it “post dramatic theatre”.2 At the same time, the rise of new media art and intermedia art
made the exhibition spaces turn to dynamic from static. These trends prompt various forms of live
performance and performance art converging in art museums. The impact of this collision on the
exhibition field will be derived in this paper through the study of performance arts, theatre and
exhibition spaces.

Trances of performance art can be seen in ancient religious activities. But in the 1960s, Fluxus
artists really introduced the concept of performance art into the art museums. In China,
performance art has its own unique development context. This paper will summarize the
development direction of performing arts in Chinese exhibition spaces by exploring relevance of
performance and theatre art and its impact on the field of exhibitions.

1 Yang, Z., 2019. In the Age of Pan-performance, Go to Art Museums to See Performances. [online] Available at:
https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/W29UGDdvhkoXFhFjQZoexQ [Accessed 21 Jan. 2020].
2 Lehmann, H., 2010. Post dramatic Theatre. Beijing: Peking University Press, p.5.
1. How performance art develop in China

In China, the concept of performance art appeared in 1980s. Relatively loose political and cultural
environment, the changes in social life caused by the commodity economy and other factors
triggered the possibility of ideas. The past art forms have be unable to meet the artists’ needs, just
as Western art concepts flooded into China. The so-called Avant-garde contemporary art in China
was transplanted from the Western artistic language, and more artists failed to establish a
judgment on traditional civilization. Take Concept 21 as an example. At this time, artists chose self-
abuse and bandaging to create their works, and the works were full of trauma. In the winter of
1986, several students from the Central Academy of Fine Art and the Central Academy of Craft Art
wrapped their bodies with canvases in front of the canteen of Peking University.3 After that, they
walked out of the stairs with extremely slow steps, moving forward and wandering in the fierce
sound of gongs and drums. One of the participating artist said, “I mainly want to emphasize that
the process of capturing oneself which comes from the process of action, not the completion of an
action.”4 At this stage, artists have used their bodies to create, but have not paid attention to the
special functions of the body. Due to some official restrictions and the artists’ thirst for attention
from the public, the performance art were impromptu and mostly happened in public places. Since
the performance art was introduced in China, every decade has shown its diverse characteristics.

Sheng Qi, Zheng Yuke, Zhao Jianhai, Kang Mu, and Xi Jianjun, Concept 21, Performance Art, 1986

In 1990s, artists put more emphasis on personal experience, and it was popular to create with their
own bodies as materials. In 1994, Zhang Huan implemented his work 12 m2 in Beijing East Village.5
He coated his body with honey and sat in a public toilet for two hours to allow flies to stick on his
skin. He hoped to map the original questions about the body in this way.

3 Huo, S., 2010. Performance Art in China: Site and the Body. Taipei: Artist Magazine, pp.14-15.
4 Kaishui, 1987. “Action Show” in 52 Hours. Fine Art of China, 3(3), p.1.
5 Huo, S., 2010. Performance Art in China: Site and the Body. Taipei: Artist Magazine, p.50
 Zhang Huan, 12 m2, Performance Photography, 1994

Artists such as Ma Liuming and Cang Xin accepted certain experiences as their works. After coming
to Beijing East Village in 1993, Ma Liuming began to try the appearance of womenswear because
of an accidental dress up, and named his own female image Fen-Ma Liuming. Afterwards, in some
of his performance art projects and photography works, this image of feminine dressing with a
male body appeared frequently.6 Cang Xin was diagnosed with autism in 1995. In Communication,
he used his body as the medium to regain the ability to communicate with the world through
different sense organs. 7 Chinese artists completely opened practices of performance in this
decade by the actions that only used their own bodies.

Ma Liuming, Fen-Ma Liuming’s Lunch I, Performance Art, 1994

6 Kim, B., 2016. Art of Ma Liuming. Fine Arts Literature, 24(10), p.92.
7 Huo, S., 2010. Performance Art in China: Site and the Body. Taipei: Artist Magazine, pp.67-68
 Cang Xin, Communication Series No.4 - Tiananmen, Performance Photography, 2002

The bloodcurdling and violent atmosphere has deepened in China’s performance artworks, and a
lot of extreme performance artworks triggered criticisms with different stances in 2000s. Firstly, in
April 2000, the exhibition Infatuated with Injury curated by Li Xianting was held at the Central
Academy of Fine Arts.8 The works in the exhibition used human specimens and animal corpses as
materials. In this exhibition, Sun Yuan and Peng Yu fed human oil to a lifeless child specimen by a
tube. This work, Human Oil, was controversial. In another work called Body Link they transfused
their blood to a specimen of conjoined twins.9 The exhibition was full of such sharp languages.
The curator believe that YBA (Young British Artists) have provided symbolic meaning to these
materials, such as Damien Hirst and Marc Quinn.10 In November, Zhu Yu exhibited his work Eating
People at the exhibition Fuck Off.11 A year later he made Sacrifice. Artists were using ultra materials
to express pent-up panic, helplessness, and depression. It is undeniable that there were also
significant performance art works during this period, which showed the Chinese perspective on
the international art stage.
Sun Yuan and Peng Yu, Human Oil, Perfomance, Medical Sample, 2000

8 Lv, P., 2020. Contemporary Art in 21st Century China. Shanghai: Shanghai People’s Publishing House.
9 Li, X., 2000. The Curating Thinking of “Infatuated with Injury”. [online] Art Link Art. Available at:
http://www.artlinkart.com/cn/article/overview/4cebrvpi/about_by2/L/425auxn [Accessed 27 Jan. 2020].
10 Lv, P., 2020. Contemporary Art in 21st Century China. Shanghai: Shanghai People’s Publishing House.
11 Lv, P., 2020. Contemporary Art in 21st Century China. Shanghai: Shanghai People’s Publishing House
In the past decade, performance arts in art museums were gradually getting closer to theatrical
performances with more focus on worth-seeing, like the trend in the Western countries. The
factors such as consumerism, demand for culture experience diversified forms of drama. Therefore,
dramas broke the traditional relationship between audience and performer and entered public
spaces such like art museums to provide more possibility of artworks, interaction and public
education. In 2015, Tianzhuo Chen, born in 1985, held his first solo exhibition in Paris.12 His media
for artistic creating include sculpture, painting, installation, photography, video, and so on. At the
same time, he had been involved in commercial cooperation in mainstream culture. At the opening
ceremony of the Faurschou Foundation Beijing group exhibition Entropy in 2018, Tianzhuo Chen’s
performance work Ksana was staged. 13 The performance was a semi-improvised physical
experiment, and the installations, lights and videos in the hall blended with the performance. The
perspective of the audiences’ mobile viewing and religious symbols in the performance brought a
ritualistic experience. After the opening, the work continued to be with installations and records.
Performance has become an everyday art form, and is more often integrated into projects as one
of media. Artists are still discussing whether the contingency and immediacy of performance art
are indispensable and how we can record and write it. For art museums, how to use performance
to support the idea that everyone is an artist’ is being watched.

2. How Performance Art Interacts with Theatre Art and Exhibition Spaces

(1) The Interaction between Performance Art and Theatre Art within the Space of
Exhibitions

In the new century, Chinese theatre art is seeking for new performing spaces and cores, and
gradually intersects with performance art via the pursuit of real experience. In the 20th century,
many new genres of drama broke out and the forms of drama became more diversified. After 21st
century, performance spaces were in continuous changes in the development of the theatre art.
The development of factors such as the viewing experience and visual needs also prompts the
theatre public education developing into different fields. Starting with Bertolt Brecht, the actors
started to communicate with audiences. Since then, playwrights have broken many traditions of
drama, liberated drama from texts, abandoned narrative and pictorial visual structures, and payed
more attention to the common experience of artists and audiences, as well as the space. These
change brought theatre art closer to the characteristics of performance art that focus on the
meaning of the artists’ behavioral process. The development of performance art attaches
importance to the texts of action plans and archives for now. It makes performance art more
oriented to theatrical performance. At the UCCA Beijing Society Guidance Part I in May 2019, the
artistic practices that Chen Shaoxiong and the New History Group did in 1990s were showed by the

12 Xu, D., 2015. Long March Space Announces to Comprehensively Agent Tianzhuo Chen. [online] Artnet.
Available at: https://www.artnetnews.cn/people/chentianzhuo-changzhengkongjian-5835 [Accessed 23 Jan.
2020].
13 Faurschou Foundation Beijing, 2018. Exhibition: Entropy. [online] Available at:

https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/8QDuPIEeOtt0e9hKxVlE7g [Accessed 26 Jan. 2020].

form of archives and a little of images.14 From these archives, it can be seen that the performance
art practices in 1990s were no longer improvisational like 1980s, but rather like plays with scripts.
The series of works by Tianzhuo Chen, such as ADAHA II, cannot be clearly defined as performance
art or drama. It contained well-designed lights, installations, music, costumes and character
shapes.15 It can only be said that it was a performance in an art museum.

New History Group, Society Guidance Part I, Exhibition Spot, 2019

Tianzhuo Chen, ADAHA II, Performance, 2015

No matter how deconstructed, theatre is an art based on time and space. When theatre is placed
in art museum, its expression of time and space can be used as a clue to interpret artworks. Art
museums inevitably emphasize their collection work when they are curating. If the stories told by
collections are not exciting, it will be difficult to attract visitors. A boring exhibition makes it
impossible for visitors to find their connection to the exhibition, and it cannot provide visitors with
the background. To understand what was present, and there was no fulcrum for socializing.

14 UCCA Center for Contemporary Art, 2019. Society Guidance: Part I. [online] Available at:
https://ucca.org.cn/en/exhibition/society-guidance-part-1/ [Accessed 21 Jan. 2020].
15 Tianzhuo Chen., 2015. ADAHA II. [online] Available at: http://tianzhuochen.com/archives/728 [Accessed 22
Jan. 2020].
Performance, whether as an independent work or a public event based on an exhibition, provides
the audiences with a process of active thinking.

(2)The Interaction as an Extension of Art Work Outside of Exhibition Space

Because of the contingency and immediacy of performance art, the space where the actions
happens is the only exhibition space. In De Rerum Natura, Lucretius said that the most important
thing in activity space is not the entity, but the void space and place we vision.16 The moment that
performance was set up, the exhibition space came into being. Zhang Yuan’s artwork 12 m²
occurred in a public toilet on East Village. When the project was underway, a villager walked in and
was startled to see him.17 At this moment, the public toilet was where the exhibition was taking
place. During the same period, artists, such as Zhu Fadong, also carried out their own projects in
the public area of East Village. As soon as Zhu Fadong came to Beijing, he began to implement The
Person For Sale.18 The artist wore a blue Chinese tunic suit with Chinese characters “The person
for sale, price negotiable” sewn on the back, and walked through the East Village, Tiananmen
Square and the streets of Beijing. In the implementation process of the work, it has continuously
attracted the attention from media and the public. There were many job hunters in the big cities
in the 1990s. Unemployment was a very big social issue at the time. Zhu Fadong used the identity
of a worker to ask questions directly in his work. In fact, this kind of living state is also the artist
who just left his hometown and came to Beijing facing. At the same time, it is a irony that
everything is materialized and commercialization. Performance art extends exhibition space to any
place where actions can occur. The role played by this space is not only a structure, but also a
decisive element in the work. Sitting in the public toilet Zhang Huan endured the bad smell, flies
and high temperature in the public toilet. He used this space to ask questions about the identity of
marginalized people and the realistic living conditions. People who watched or accidentally
watched the action in this space can also feel a part of suffering of artist. At present, many
contemporary art museums set open exhibition spaces. Contemporary art and its field become a
part of the exhibition together, unlike the static exhibition methods with limited space in the
traditional exhibitions, which provides multiple possibilities for contemporary art creation and
display.

16 Lucretius, T.C., 1981. De Rerum Natura. Beijing: The Commercial Press, p.19.
17 Qiu, Z., 2013. Beuys Temperament. Art Monthly, 9(10), pp.15-16.
18 Jia, W., 1996. The Charm of Action: Recording Artist Zhu Fadng. Modern Elegance, 12(10), pp.43-45.
 Zhu Fadong, The Person for Sale, Performance Photography, 1994

3. The Changing Role of the Curator

The exhibition space for performance art can take place wherever possible, so that the role of the
curators of the “exhibition” changes. As the forms of contemporary art became what they are today,
artists have begun to try for autonomy that explain their own artworks. Artists can be curators, art
creators, and media makers. Qiu Zhijie is an artist and a curator. He was heavily influenced by Fluxus
and Joseph Beuys in early days on his creation.19 In 2002, he and Lu Jie acted as curators in the
Long March: A Walking Visual Display, which implemented in twenty locations along the Long
March. It is a performance art project about exhibitions, and Qiu Zhijie also spent three months
worked as an artist.20 He wore a pair of specially shoes, and inscribed the “Left” and “Right” in
Chinese and English respectively on the soles. He left marks of his soles on different materials
according to the field during his journey. Curators who originally were artists has the advantage of
being brave enough to break through and conceive. In such project, the curator is no longer a
collection manager. The complex constitution of art forms and the extension of exhibition field
make the curation more like a rehearsal process. The curator is both the director and the
participant in this performance.

For art museums, performance art is a part of the exhibitions and an important part of public
education. The timeliness and the fluxion of space and time make performance can be a medium
to connect the entities in the space. Taking the performance Diffuse Reflection in Song Art Museum
as an example, this project took place in the exhibition Abstraction(s)21. It is an impromptu dance
performed by a youth dance group combining space of museum and the ongoing exhibition. The
dancers entered the exhibition hall with visitors and danced among the visitors. They conveyed

19 Qiu, Z., 2013. Beuys Temperament. Art Monthly, 9(10), pp.15-16.

20 Huo, S., 2010. Performance Art in China: Site and the Body. Taipei: Artist Magazine, pp.22-23.
21 Song Art Museum, 2019. When Performance Art Enter Public Spaces. [online] Available at:
https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/cExdKgKAapKzJXkYxVeWcg [Accessed 25 Jan. 2020].
their subconscious memories, desires, emotions, and ideas by their bodies. Visitors could join the
performance, participate in creation, or choose to simply watch. It did not affect artworks, but
more lead the visitors to watch works and drive them to think actively. After the performance, the
venue invited the dancer, event planner and a critic to have a conversazione with the visitors to
talk about their ideas and answer questions. This kind of activities have not only enhanced visitors’
understanding of the exhibition, but also achieved the goal of popularizing the performance and
theatre arts knowledge. Theatre art experimenters expect audiences to experience performances
with introspection skill and the desire for interaction. Artists and art institutions hope to have
dynamic and interesting events to attract visitors, and find art forms that allow visitors and artists
to participate together and fill the void between visitors and artworks. Performance in the art
museum can solve these two needs well and provide topics as a social fulcrum.

Unique Body Space, Diffuse Reflection, 2019

Conclusion

The roles in the exhibition no longer have clear boundaries, and the fusion of theatre and
contemporary art has blurred the boundaries of certain art forms. Today, it is difficult for us to
divide art through media as before. Art museums are providing new relationships between
audience and performer, enabling visitors to truly participate in art. Performance art, theatre art,
video and installations are prompting the art museum to dispel the gap between the visitors and
works with a positive attitude, making the art museum an integrated culture site.

For theatre, special fields bring audiences a sense of tension and immersion that differ from the
proscenium stage, giving playwrights more creative space. In the age of the popularization of art,
the visibility of performance art, the interactivity of art museums and the experimental of theatre
are inevitable trends. The boundary crossing expansion of theatre and performance art opens up
the possibility for art museums to reconnect visitors and artists.
References

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Kaishui, 1987. “Action Show” in 52 Hours. Fine Art of China, 3(3).

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