By Thomas Berghuis
Book Review
Timezone 8 Books, Beijing, 2007 pp.320, RRP: $64.95 AUD
The rise in popularity of Chinese performance art can be ascribed to as many ‘right’ reasons as ‘wrong’ ones. Beginning about a decade after performance art’s widespread revival in the West during the protest era of the late 1960s, it surged in China in the 1970s, after the death of Mao Zedong, with the kind of frenetic energy that comes from decades of pent up frustration. It was (and still is) perhaps because of this difference between the ‘free world’ and China, that performance art in China was lent a greater credibility, for it was seen as the purgative expression of a deeply repressive social system. This is true to a point, and Chinese performance art has rightly earned its own place within the annals of contemporary art, known for an originality that is born not only from social unrest but from not having to be answerable to a commercial market (though this is changing). On the other hand it has been subject to the sentimentality that the West typically unleashes on cultures which it believes less privileged that itself. It is a sentimentality born of guilt that, while wanting to change nothing, expresses itself in uncritical wonder. Thomas Berghuis’s book, the first major study of Chinese performance art in English, is an indispensable document in assessing and demystifying the Chinese performance art phenomenon.
One of the difficulties in defining performance art for anything other than an expert audience is in it being, like land art, both a movement and a practice. Unlike land art, however, performance is rooted in the fundamentally ritualistic and incantatory nature of art and by implication hearkens to art’s beginnings. Performance art is therefore something