Yulia Dreyzis; Shiyu Gao; Linda Pittwood
Yulia Dreyzis
Assistant Professor,Institute of Asian and African Studies, Chinese Philology Department,Moscow State University
Performative Strategies in Contemporary Chinese Avant-garde Poetry
Poetic text today, in an era of interdisciplinary connections, may seem a stagnant phenomenon. Avant-garde poetic practice opens up the experience of contiguous art forms, while versification itself undergoes notable changes. A familiar poem may converge with other genres directly and can implicitly borrow their technique and optical effects. New Chinese poetry is particularly susceptible to the influence of the latest concepts of modern art. It gives enough material for contextualizing it while considering other forms of culture and avant-garde practice. Such contextualization can apply an analysis paradigm for performative word art as developed by Tomáš Glanc in the context of Czech and Russian neo-avant-garde. It perceives experimental poetry as one performing a word shift thus making the word labile. Avant-garde strategies encompass intervention, transgression, construction of new relations between word and image, exploration of the text’s corporeality and its esoteric dimension, work with its spatial dimensions, double or triple coding. Examples of this phenomena abound in Greater China in the works of Ouyang Jianghe, Yang Xiaobin, Ouyang Yu, Xia Yu, Chen Li, Xu Bing, Wuqing, Xiao An and many other experimental artists. Their creative use of word shift principles shows how performative strategies are adapted in contemporary Chinese poetry keeping in mind the specific hanzi (character) medium that constitutes their basis. It seems both a continuation of a long-existing tradition and a radical exploration of ‘iconic turn’ in the field of language.
Shiyu Gao
University of Edinburgh, Year 2 PHD Candidate in History of Art
Technological Body in Becoming : Body representation in contemporary Chinese new media art
Over the past few decades, the advancement of various new technologies has reshaped contemporary Chinese art. From the first video artwork created by Zhang Peili in 1988, contemporary Chinese art engaging with new technologies, such as 3D printing and head-tracking tech, provides variant ways of our interaction with new sciences, technologies, and other forms of matter, yet has been underappreciated. What is the signification of technologies applied in contemporary Chinese art? How technologies effect on the development of contemporary Chinese art? How technologies reshape the relationship between artists and their social conditions?
To answer these questions, the paper will focus on analysing artwork created by Zhang Peili since the 1980s. It will investigate the different methods in which contemporary Chinese artists have deployed new technologies of body representation. It will argue that Zhang produces a wider social spectrum to deconstruct the society by communicating with newly-emergent technologies that bridge video, installation and performance. I will point out how Chinese new media artists develop artistic approaches of digital technologies to explore new possibilities of presenting artists’ individual subjectivities in reaction to the social landscapes where dramatic changes are occurring.
In a transcultural perspective, the paper will connect Merleau-Ponty’s idea of the body within phenomenology of perception with Guanzi’s Daoist conception of the body. I will show how Chinese contemporary artists communicate with technology and the strategies it re-constructs our bodies.
Linda Pittwood
The University of Nottingham, 3rd year PhD candidate Critical Theory and Cultural Studies
Sperm, IVF, and male bloodline in the work of two contemporary artists from the PRC
This paper examines the heteronormativity reproduced through the performative-installation and video Sperm, 2006, by female artist Xiao Lu and the erasure of the female and feminized body in the later work of male artist Ma Liuming, using a lens of biopower (Foucault, 1976, 1977, 1980).
In 2006 in a group exhibition at the Kanga Hotel, Yan’an, PRC, contemporary artist Xiao Lu asked male audience members to participate in her performative-installation by donating their sperm in order that she could undergo IVF treatment. The installation comprised empty vessels and a silver refrigerator ready to receive donations. No-one participated. She documented the emotional debates that the installation prompted between artists, gallery staff, the public and herself beginning in the gallery and continuing into the evening in a hotel room. The gallery-based performance and its documentation are both parts of her artwork titled, Sperm, 2006. With this work she presents herself as a woman who is produced by the dominant discourse constructing women as ‘reproducers’ (Greenhalgh, 2010:40) but also resists biopolitical control (Foucault, 1976, 1977, 1980), aiming to challenge the regulation of births that prevents her as a single woman from accessing IVF treatment in the PRC. The second part of this paper, compares Xiao Lu’s ‘woman’ to the disappearance of the female body and feminized persona of male artist Ma Liuming (Fen Ma Liuming) in his more recent work. In this analysis, Ma (often characterised as having a transgender performance persona) can be understood as reproducing a form of heteronormativity in China. The artist uses his masculinity and his ejaculating body to construct himself as part of an ongoing – male – bloodline that actually renders the female body invisible.