Shuqin Cui
- Published in print:
- 2015
- Published Online:
- November 2016
- ISBN:
- 9780824840037
- eISBN:
- 9780824868390
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of Hawai'i Press
- DOI:
- 10.21313/hawaii/9780824840037.003.0007
- Subject:
- Society and Culture, Asian Studies
This chapter explores how women artists employ their own bodies in performance practices for the conceptual and visual construction of a central thesis: the body in pain. It begins by first examining ...
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This chapter explores how women artists employ their own bodies in performance practices for the conceptual and visual construction of a central thesis: the body in pain. It begins by first examining paradoxical issues of public (mis)reception of women's performative acts. Taking Xiao Lu's Dialogue (1989) as instructive, it considers the conventions at work when the public interprets a work of radical utterance about unspeakable personal, sexual experience. It then turn to Zhao Yue's Grids (2007) to exemplify self-mutilation as bodily resistance to social confinement and commercial exploitation, and how the public and art critics especially think of body modification as nonart. The chapter goes on to explore the mediation between the body in pain and the artist's self. He Chengyao's performance series unveils how a daughterly body reexperiences the maternal pain caused by social-political trauma and restores it in memory, and Chen Lingyang's Twelve Flower Months foregrounds the bleeding vagina and uses menstrual blood to express emotional and psychological uncertainty. The discussion concludes that performance art remains a marginal practice, paradoxical in art rhetoric. The performance of the female body in pain challenges and is challenged by a domain of art usually centered on visual constructions of the male body and evaluated by conventional criteria.Less
This chapter explores how women artists employ their own bodies in performance practices for the conceptual and visual construction of a central thesis: the body in pain. It begins by first examining paradoxical issues of public (mis)reception of women's performative acts. Taking Xiao Lu's Dialogue (1989) as instructive, it considers the conventions at work when the public interprets a work of radical utterance about unspeakable personal, sexual experience. It then turn to Zhao Yue's Grids (2007) to exemplify self-mutilation as bodily resistance to social confinement and commercial exploitation, and how the public and art critics especially think of body modification as nonart. The chapter goes on to explore the mediation between the body in pain and the artist's self. He Chengyao's performance series unveils how a daughterly body reexperiences the maternal pain caused by social-political trauma and restores it in memory, and Chen Lingyang's Twelve Flower Months foregrounds the bleeding vagina and uses menstrual blood to express emotional and psychological uncertainty. The discussion concludes that performance art remains a marginal practice, paradoxical in art rhetoric. The performance of the female body in pain challenges and is challenged by a domain of art usually centered on visual constructions of the male body and evaluated by conventional criteria.
Zhang Zhen
- Published in print:
- 2010
- Published Online:
- September 2011
- ISBN:
- 9789622099845
- eISBN:
- 9789882206731
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Hong Kong University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5790/hongkong/9789622099845.003.0006
- Subject:
- Film, Television and Radio, Film
This chapter discusses image-making and experimental visual production, focusing on still and moving images about performing in the city. It focuses on a few photo works that enact surreal or ...
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This chapter discusses image-making and experimental visual production, focusing on still and moving images about performing in the city. It focuses on a few photo works that enact surreal or spectral “live performances” on indifferent city scenes: Yang Fudong's triptych The First Intellectual (2000), Li Wei's pair of Mirroring images (2000), and Chen Lingyang's panoramic tableau 25:00 (2002).Less
This chapter discusses image-making and experimental visual production, focusing on still and moving images about performing in the city. It focuses on a few photo works that enact surreal or spectral “live performances” on indifferent city scenes: Yang Fudong's triptych The First Intellectual (2000), Li Wei's pair of Mirroring images (2000), and Chen Lingyang's panoramic tableau 25:00 (2002).
