Since the late 1980s, Chinese artists have been developing body-based art centered on suffering and self-abuse, close to certain Western performances in principle, yet quite different in their intentions. The difference lies in Chinese culture – from Confucian to Taoist thought – and to the Chinese tradition of learned civilians – the intellectual as the safeguard of ethics, but also to recent changes in society. In this context, the artist’s body is a social body that reflects the paradoxes of the country’s recent political evolution and the steadily increasing tensions between communist and ultra-liberal economic dogma. However, this art also draws on the Cultural Revolution, a somber era of the country’s history during which thousands of intellectuals were condemned to humiliation and whose fifty-year anniversary China is not taking great care to commemorate.
Mao once claimed: Art is for the masses of the people. A “socialist realist” art in service of Maoist propaganda, that is, far from serving the interests of the masses. Just after the Cultural Revolution, artistic freedom, which had long been repressed in China, is reclaimed in particular by the artistic-literary group Stars Group1. The name…
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