He Yunchang, Bodies, Presence and Rebellion
9th November, 2020
The world of Chinese contemporary art is intersected by two largely different social and political frameworks. This convergence is a meeting of both the traditional values embedded within Chinese society and their overarching political imperatives, with that of the commercialisation and artistic freedoms of the global art market. In this unique space, the People’s Republic of China (PRC) has seen the evolution of its own avant-garde movement along with the establishment of many artists who have produced astounding and controversial works, that critically engage with social and political realities in the PRC. One of the most prominent artists to emerge in this arena is He Yunchang, a performance artist who uses his body as a site for challenging institutional confinements on personal and creative liberty, and to contemplate the meaning of the ‘body’ under these restrictive conditions. He Yunchang is a self-examining artist however; his performances are part of a continuum of concepts interrogating the position of the physical body in China’s cultural matrix and is part of a lineage of artists who have used these corporeal concepts to express the relationship between society and themselves. His work demonstrates a sense of rebellion that was prominent in the experimental art movement during the 1990s that promoted ‘creative and individual human freedom’ (Andrews and Gao cited in Berghuis 2012, p 144), whilst the artist himself has created his own iconography over the course of twenty five years of producing performance works.
He Yunchang was born in 1967 and studied oil painting at the Central Yunnan Art Institute in China, graduating in 1991. He has also produced sculptural works, however his practice is characterised by his iconic performance art pieces where he accomplishes physically intensive feats and performs violent and often dangerous acts upon himself. According to He (2019) he was ‘scared of things and cowardly’ during his childhood yet came to realise that his body was able to quickly make full recoveries from injury. The recovery process following One Metre of Democracy (2010) took about 60 days (He, 2019), leaving a large scar down the right side of his body. He often puts his body through extreme physical punishment through both injury and endurance, creating very striking and powerful imagery of the human body being pushed to its extremities. These particular characteristics have categorically portrayed He Yunchang as a ‘rebellious’ artist in terms of experimental art in the PRC.
Performance art is a particular genre that has been officially banned in China’s mainstream art circles. The exhibition of ‘Openly Display Blood, Savage Acts and Obscenity, and That Are Being Conducted in the Name of “Art”’ are prohibited by official directives from the Ministry of Culture, as such acts and obscenities are perceived to indicate a ‘violent trend in the development of contemporary Chinese art’ (Berghuis 2012, p 139). Such work encourages the production of artwork that publicly criticises the PRC government. Thus performance works have been attached to the avant-garde as a cast of experimental art that is produced to voice critical reflections on matters relating to the state, in turn challenging conservative Chinese views that; ‘art should serve as a pleasurable aesthetic feeling, and make a constructive contribution towards social progress and well-being’ (Gladstone 2014, p 19). One Metre of Democracy (2010) exemplifies this poignantly as the performance itself and the documentary material is comprised of a crowd observing a nurse perform the bloodletting act, and He’s naked body bleeding on to a white bed. He had twenty-five participants vote on whether or not to proceed with the ‘operation’ although the artist retained the right to veto their decision (He, 2019). This is both a major departure from ‘pleasurable aesthetics’ as well as a graphic display of the body under violence, that responds to He’s perception of ‘restrictive societies’ (Meiqin 2014, p 23) as well as interrogating the functioning of democracy with his body as a powerful medium that helps him break free of social constraints.
The body has occupied an important space in Chinese contemporary art as it represents the presence of life. Zhang (2013), states that bodies exist through the nourishment of its biological systems before being able to exist as a site for ‘controlling power’, and that ‘choices and changes in China have been directed towards the self’ (Huber 2013, p 17). Because the connection between the ‘self’ and China is dictated through the manifestation of control over the body, artists use bodies to re-assert self-control and communicate the realities of their society. One of the first major performance works to express this in China was Zhang Huan’s 12 Square Metres (1994), where he covered his naked body with fish sauce and honey, then placed himself in the sordid public lavatories in his hometown for one hour. Withstanding the heat and unsanitary conditions of this location was an act of endurance, and a critique of the reality that people are experiencing day to day (Park 2016, p 105). This work exists in various formats including photographs that preserve the performance in a permanent temporal state to be ‘spectated’ (Park 2016, p 105); a common way for performance art to be documented and exhibited.
Photography and video documentation have been a primary aspect of He Yunchang’s methodology. As performance work is formally prohibited in Chinese art institutions, documentation has been one of the major strategies for exhibiting work and building up catalogues for He and other performance-based artists. He came to this realisation after losing a photograph of an earlier original work and has since employed teams to document his work, even having ‘rotating teams for works that take more than 24 hours’ (He 2019). Additionally, the qualities of the medium allow for parallel commentary between the artist’s work and real-time social currents. One such example of this is found in the work Blooming Season: Snow in June (2015) where He’s body was rubbed over with sandpaper. This particular work exists in both video documentation and a suite of 36 photographs that captures the artist’s body healing over the course of one year. The date of this performance was the 4th of June 2015 during the commemoration of the Tiananmen Square Protests, raising themes of death and healing; and highlighting the weight of Tiananmen as part of the China’s history. Presenting the performance through photographic documentation instantiates a sense of enduring physical and psychological wounds inflicted by Tiananmen upon the people, and pairs it with the He’s scared body as a parallel experience. One can then view this work as year-long performance where the body is ever-present within the image.
He Yunchang with documentation of One Rib (2008). The photograph is of He with his mother wearing the rib as a necklace. Photograph in He’s studio by Darren Jorgensen, 2019.
Presence is a theme that consistently arises within He Yunchang’s work. He has used his body as the tool, medium and vehicle in his art, however in some instances he has also removed it from it from the site of performance in order to transform the work. In One Rib (2008), He had the eighth rib from his left side surgically removed from his body, to be fashioned into a necklace that was used as a prop in a series of photographs. These images were of the artist and the women in his life who he had shared an intimate relationship with. The intensity of the alteration to He’s body required three years of convincing and consultation with the surgeon, and for the first time in his practicing career; He was required to be unconscious throughout the performance (Meiqin 2014, p 9). The resulting necklace that was produced from his rib bone, became both an artefact from the performed surgery and a prop for its following photo series. Furthermore, the rib-necklace has replaced He’s body as the site for performance, through making the ‘self’ absent for the creation of work (Park 2016, p 115).
This absence of self was also and most radically realised in the final work of artist Zhang Shengquan. Zhang ’s last performance work, in 2000, was a deconstruction of his own life and social connections through self-isolation, culminating in his suicide in the name of art. His apartment was the site for this performance after his body had left it, however evidence of his life were left behind in notes that conceptualised the notion of ‘divorcing art from the artist’ in order to release the art from their presence; eventually ‘transforming the art into something other than itself’ (Park 2016, p 116). This act of ‘divorcing’ is also somewhat present in He’s One Rib as the artist is no longer physically connected to the rib bone that has now transformed into a separate object of corporeal contemplation. In the works from both He and Zhang, the body is the ‘venue of genesis’ (Huber 2013, p 187) where an object or site has been produced to transform their performance, whilst also exerting complete autonomy over their body; breaking all institutional and systematic restrictions placed over them.
He Yunchang’s art practice is a distinctly individualised impression of his own perceptions and behaviour towards society at large. The iconography of his career is made up of self-created scenarios and narratives that are ‘synchronised with other social realities’ (He 2019), where his works take on a new life of their own that he is no longer a part of. He (2019) describes his body as a ‘weapon’ that has enabled him to carry out enduring performances like Casting (2004) where he was sealed inside a block of cement for 24 hours, or The Rock Tours Around Great Britain (September 2006 to January 2007) that involved carrying a rock around the country’s perimeter and then returning it to the place it was found. He’s remarkable mental and physical endurance to carry out these works are drawn from his understanding of Zen Buddhist philosophies that emphasise the enlightenment of the mind and body. According to He (2019), because the bodies are made out of flesh, they can be ‘sacrificed for the mind’; a conviction that has illuminated much of his work.
During his youth and undergraduate degree, He familiarised himself with many pieces of classical Chinese literature surrounding Daoism and has come to resemble the figure of the ‘real painter’ from Zhuangzi (Meiqin 2014, p 7); a foundational Daoist philosophical text. This figure is said to exhibit ‘a different social demeanour than their peers, does not conform to the common knowledge of respecting authority, and believes that true artistic creation is unconventional’ (Meiqin 2014, p 6). He embodies these qualities and presents himself as the antithesis of official Chinese and commercial art principles, and his art rebels against the pressures and restrictions of the state.
An experience that gives us insight into He Yunchang’s cultural affinity for social rebelliousness, comes from a story of a man’s suicide. Meiqin (2014) recounts that in 1996, He had heard that an engineer from an area he used to work in, had poisoned himself after suffering from humiliation and poverty as a result of losing his job. The reality of the engineer’s situation resonated with He’s own circumstances which lead him to become ‘sensitive to the endurance exercised by innumerable people who did not give up’ (Meiqin 2014, p 13). In response to this, the performance Appointment with Tomorrow (1998) shows He completely covered in mud, dialling random numbers into a disconnected telephone for over an hour. The futility and hopelessness of the dialling expresses his value towards ‘individual struggle and perseverance’ (Meiqin 2014, p 14), whilst also expressing that social control of the body in is contingent to the nourishment of its ‘biological systems’ (Huber 2013, p 17). The struggle for survival and control over one’s life and body, and the need to break free from constraints is something the He understands deeply.
He Yunchang has always been attempting to express his rebellion towards the constraints of Chinese society and his visceral desire to break free of them. Perseverance to obtain a sense of freedom appears to be the consistent goal in his work. This is guided by his innate Buddhist philosophies that both helps him achieve his personal articulation of ‘true artistic creation’ (Meiqin 2014); and to perform works requiring intense physical and mental fortitude. As a result, He has crafted an incredibly distinctive practice that grants his body the prominence of the primary medium, that has been used in ways that are both in focus and periphery of its conceptual subject. Works like One Metre of Democracy (2010), One Rib (2008) are both responsive to the ‘brutality’ of society yet have produce very different contemplations. He’s body is often representative of the relationship between the ‘self’ and society, and the exercise of control over it. The very nature of his work fits in with an alumnus of outstanding artists that challenge the formal stipulations of commercial Chinese art, as it typifies the daring and rebellious qualities associated with the avant-garde and experimental art within China’s flourishing contemporary art world. The themes embedded in his performances are compounding on these points; and work to construct He Yunchang’s unmistakable image as a rebel, a sage and an artist.
References
BERGHUIS, T. J. 2012. Experimental Art, Performance and ‘Publicness’: Repositioning the Critical Mass of Contemporary Chinese Art. Journal of Visual Art Practice, 11, 135-155.
GLADSTON, P. 2014. Contemporary Chinese Art: A Critical History, London, Reaktion Books.
HE, YUNCHANG. Interviewed by: UWA student group. (27th June 2019).
HUBER, J. 2014. The Body at Stake Experiments in Chinese Contemporary Art and Theatre, Bielefeld, transcript Verlag.
PARK, J. P. 2016. The Artist Was Present: Documentation, Reconstruction, and Interpretation of Performance Art in China. Third Text, 30, 100-116.
WANG, M. 2014. The Primitive and Unproductive Body: He Yunchang and His Performance Art.