Yang Zhichao, 'Hide', 2002
3 photographs, 120 x 120
Yang Zhichao's Radical Body
"After a five-minute silence the woman stabbed the performer on his left shoulder three times. The performer bled...The process lasted 6 minutes." (PUB, 2003)
Yang Zhichao's exhibition at Eastlink Gallery this year, curated by his friend and mentor Ai Wei Wei, recalls Eastlink's infamous Fuck Off exhibition held in 2000. That exhibition was closed down after three days - commendable really given the same exhibition in London, Paris, or New York would have been still born. It was radical, visceral, categorically disruptive art. The new exhibition pertains to the space of the individual within the space of the state. Sometimes bloody, sometimes funny, it was also profoundly disrupting - and disrupting assumptions is at the heart of radical art.
Yang's primary medium is performance. Until the emergence of the new Chinese artists in the nineties, performance art in the West had become fatuous and sclerotic, with rare exceptions such as Stelarc's robotic bodies and some fairly gory feminist art (Tracey Emin is comparatively conservative). What Chinese performance artists have given us is a new performance art which draws deeply upon history and human rights. And unlike the well known pop-realism of its painters, the core characteristics of the works are entirely Chinese. Even when starkly confronting, they remain subtle and ambiguous, and thereby all the more challenging.
Two plainclothes policemen are interrogating Ai Wei Wei about Yang Zhichao, who has been undertaking a performance involving begging within Beijing's Fourth Ring Road. In the work, Ai Wei Wei is witness, referee and rule-maker. The interrogation:
"Then who is Black Goat?" I answered: "He is an artist." "Why does he carry out begging work?"... "It is performance art." Then they asked "What is performance art?"
It is both sinister and hilarious, recalling the misunderstandings at the core of Kafka's The Castle and Milan Kundera's The Joke. The piece Inside the Fourth Ring Road (1999) was performed without money except that donated in the course of the performance, a beggar being defined by what he lacks. Note that his performance commences outside a branch of the international restaurant chain, McDonalds. There was also no support other than that provided by passers-by, which is to say that such support was not provided by the state. The work of this beggar-worker was to ask strangers for money, which is not so far removed from modern China's capitalistic model. One of the characteristics of freedom is movement, without governmental restrictions, whether physical or legal, free of monitoring and interrogation. Yang asks what does it mean to be a member of society - if not beg, what are you allowed to do? Gazing over darkened hutong roofs to the Forbidden City, floodlit and empty, you are at the heart of the Middle Kingdom. Nearby are the Great Hall of the People, Tian'an Men square, and Mao's mausoleum. You are inside the First Ring. There are no beggars. Then the lights go out.
Yan Zhichao, 'Branding Iron', 2000
I wish to see the Cultural Minister of Italy, if I don't, I will kill myself. (Official statement to the Venice Police).
Yang is not critical just of China, but of all authorities who do not accord their fellow humans due respect. One extreme method in China to gain attention for your problems is to threaten or commit suicide. By re-enacting this ploy in Venice, Marco Polo's home, and being arrested accordingly, he notes how similar the use of power is in the West as in China, and how similarly distant.
"The performer drew his own blood while pouring it into a dice mould, and took the cast dice from the mould after the blood had coagulated. He drew blood three times during the whole process of 45 minutes." Macao
This piece takes place in Macao and Beijing and surely refers to Marc Quinn's 1991 work, Self, a frozen blood-casting of the artist's head. Gambling is banned in mainland China. But it is also universal, in restaurants, laneways and across Mah-jong tables - and everyone has a chance in 1.3 billion. What are the chances of being born into a well connected family? What are your chances of contracting AIDS through a contaminated transfusion? What are the chances of winning? Or losing? Yang asks, are they equal?
One theory of masochism is that the masochist does not obtain pleasure from the pain inflicted. Rather, feeling anything at all is the objective. The masochist is in a heightened state of boredom. But who is the masochist here? Among other things, Yang has drawn with his own blood (China Red, 2005/6), attached a 40cm long artificial tail to his own sacrum (Tail, 2003), had his identity number scorched onto his back (Iron, 2000), and had two sprays of grass from Suzhou river in Shanghai embedded in his skin (Planting Grass, 2000). It is not sensationalism. He has eschewed the celebrity of some of his contemporaries. He conceives his works slowly, methodically and with great determination.
Yang Zhichao, 'Planting Grass', 200
130 x 88 cm, edition of 8
An object was chosen by Lao Ai (Wei Wei) and through surgery was implanted permanently into the performer's right leg. The nature of this object will not be revealed to the performer or others.
You can see the object in the x-ray photographs which have been taken every year since Hide 1 was performed in 2002. It is some sort of ring, not completely uniform and maybe incomplete. It is a secret, private to Ai Wei Wei. It could be removed but Yang wants to leave it there. The x-rays are reminders. He has also had 1.6 grams of dirt from the upper stream of the Yellow River inserted into him (Revelations No.1), before the downstream pollution could affect it. The makeup of the earth is meticulously recorded - gravel 5%, sand 60%, clay 15%, organics 0.2%, nitrogen 17.8 ppm, phosphorus 8.3 ppm, potassium 62.0ppm, alkali 0.2%. Another time ash from a volcanic explosion were buried in his body (Revelations No.2: Ashes, 2006). On the third occasion, darkness itself was sewn inside him by a surgeon wearing infrared glasses and working in total darkness (Revelations No.3: Night, 2006). He can do this because it is his body. He owns it, he controls it, even if that control is sometimes delegated or adumbrated. Each burial reaffirms his life, his existence, his ability to act, and to do so within an authoritarian system professing to be the ultimate power and owner of all capital, including human.
Yang Zhichao, 'Scenes from Ashes'
oil on canvas, 300 x 200
Further musing on the nature of individual privacy and the individual's function are contained in his Love Story. Since July 28, 1996, the artist has recorded every date, start and end time of his sex life - though what this constitutes is undefined. The data is recorded on a series of cards in digital print, recalling old-fashioned punch-cards. They contain no other information, not even his name, nor that of his partner or partners. Here he is just a specimen under observation. Though filled with sex, the work - and I mean work - is un-erotic. And for all the information, it tells you nothing about him. The only love is in the title.
His latest works include an apparent volte face of photo-realist paintings, scenes from previous performances, produced on the scale of old Western history paintings. They are more in the line of Courbet and Thomas Eakins rather than Jean Louis David. The artist sits calmly, his eyes closed, as in Scene from Hide or Scene from Ashes, or lies at the centre, as in Scene from Iron or Scene from Planting Grass. They are monumental reproductions of documentary photography. He is the object of the incisions and of our vision, reinforced by the various cameramen and photographers present. Ai Wei Wei appears in all except Ashes. With these works his space ventures into ours and marks it as absurd, mocking our 'serious' love of art, sending up the art market, its pretention of authority in its peddling of authenticity.
There are many performance artists in China who are redefining the human nature of space, whether physical, philosophical or political. The most famous of these include Zhang Huan, and Ai Wei Wei. Yang Zhichao is their equal.
Chris Moore
All quotes from exhibition catalogue.
Yang Zhichao: Works 1999-2008
9-31 August, 2008
Eastlink Gallery
Curator & Editor: Ai Wei Wei
5th Floor, Building 6
50 Moganshan Road
Shanghai, China
www.eastlinkgallery.cn
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Chris Moore is a writer and a partner in the contemporary art investment firm, 
