{"id":6747,"date":"2012-11-09T00:00:53","date_gmt":"2012-11-08T16:00:53","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.chengduliving.com\/?p=6747"},"modified":"2012-11-18T18:30:36","modified_gmt":"2012-11-18T10:30:36","slug":"experimental-live-art","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.chengduliving.com\/experimental-live-art\/","title":{"rendered":"Experimental Live Art in Chengdu"},"content":{"rendered":"
It’s mid-autumn. The lotus leaves have wilted, leaving a desiccated crop of dead brown stalks in their place. Stalky shadows on the water look dark against the pallid sky. In between ravines of this withered foliage are long hips of grassy, muddy earth. In the swamp waters of Hetang Yuese<\/a>, a foreign woman wades almost knee-deep in just her trousers. Long, gossamer brown hair swarms around her. For those who’d recognize it, her image recalls a painting by John William Waterhouse, “The Lady of Shallot,” a scene of antiquated beauty that famously contains a woman floating similarly in a pond, sort of otherworldly.<\/p>\n Rather than be the subject of a painting, however, the woman is a target for a nearby throng of spectators, photographers and journalists. As she moves nearly imperceptibly through the viscous dead-lotus waters, another person straddles a ravine, bottomless, clinging to the mud with bare hands and feet — head invisible amid clumps of grass. Nearby, another man, face and hands covered in white makeup, performs butoh-<\/em>like dance movements in the grass, shirtless. Other strange-looking souls cluster on the muddy land bridge between the waters, having removed items of clothing, as well as any reservations.<\/p>\n They are here explicitly to perform in a public setting; modesty is not allowed. This is experimental live art in Chengdu.<\/p>\n That was on October 14th, the third full day of the\u00a0UP-ON International Live Art Festival<\/a>, only the second of such live events to occur in four years. Spearheaded by local organizers devoted to curation and experimentation, UP-ON was founded in 2008, when the central government lifted an egregious ban on live performance art. The ban had been in place since 2001, when state officials reacted in horror to what they saw as a peril to stability and a danger to public life, although it had previously been welcomed. The first UP-ON festival, unique from this one, included Japanese artists Arai Shin-Ichi and Yoshinori Niwa. They put on dramatic works that may, indeed, have seemed provocative in light of performance art’s recently contentious history.<\/p>\n Chengdu-based international artist Zhou Bin<\/a>, Chengdu sculptor Yan Cheng, and artist Liu Chengying curated this huge undertaking, which also serves as a platform for international dialogue, scholarship, and public exchange. Zhou Bin has a long personal history of doing just this: turning public places, tools and ideas into groundwork for a broader discussion. It’s one of the foundational underpinnings of the artist’s philosophy, distinguishing him <\/em>from the mainstream Chengdu art market.<\/p>\n From the mid-1990’s until 2001, Chengdu had a singular reputation for its “live art” (????\u00a0xinwei yishu<\/em>)<\/em>. Both productive and socially relevant, artists like Dai Guangyu, Zhou Bin<\/a>, and Liu Chengying instigated ground-breaking performances that called into question the city’s priorities, including the preservation of fresh water and\u00a0historic sites. This instructive and socially engaging way of confronting crucial public issues had a profound effect on the people involved, bringing a surge in community-based dialogue that could never have been started by the state.<\/p>\nArt Gets Un-Banned<\/h2>\n
Live Art Returns to Chengdu<\/h2>\n