Let Perforamnce Art Fly Awhile-2 Zhou Bin
On Tuesday, Jan 18th , at 8 pm Beijing time, bbs.artintern.net (艺术国际艺术公社) , or Art International Public Forum, hosted an online symposium titled 让行为飞会儿, or Let Performance Art Fly Awhile. The name is a play on 让子弹飞, or Let the Bullets Fly, a current box-office hit in China, directed by and starring Wen Jiang. Tuesday night’s symposium was mediated by Wang Dongdong (王栋栋) and Zhang Shiying (张世英), and revolved around work and commentary by six contemporary Chinese performance artists; Gua Zi (刮子), He Ling (何玲), He Liping (何力平), Ma Yi(马一)，and Zhou Bin (周斌) and Wen Peng (文 鹏).
《Meat Insect-Landscape Scroll》Zhou Bin, Performance Art, 2007, Sichuan
Today we focus on Zhou Bin (周斌), by looking at a couple threads in the forum.
Artists had been cuing in since 8 pm, tho nobody said much until Dong Dong jumped in with a criterium for performance art: “I feel this piece is very interesting, to use the body’s crafty style to change out another feeling.”
Then, next post,
8:50 Zhou Bin: Today let's talk about the language of performance art.
Next post is unrelated,
8:50 Gua.zi : We’re absolutely safe.
It was hard to get a handle on forum threads. A strange multi-tracking of thought and real time dis-connection between artists spaces out the reader.
8:56 Zhou Bin: Performance artists should be vigilant against “fever”, and peacefully return to performance art language experimentation. It’s important.
After three minutes of furious and fragmented posting, none of which addressed Zhou Bin’s “fever”, he showed up with defined terms.
8:59 Zhou Bin: This kind of “fever”, in Chinese medicine means acute break out, of which a fever (elevated body temperature) is the main symptom.
9:03 Zhang Dong Dong: Your view is very important. Though, say, criticism today seldom focuses on performance art, and performance, its own inertia, is a clear problem.
This last comment by Dong Dong is an unclear response to Zhou Bin’s “fever”.
9:10 Zhou Bin: (in response to 8:52, Flaming Wind: Brother Zhou, can you analyze, with performance language, Wang Ting’s 《Warm Oneself》)？ 《Warm Oneself》gives me the initial feeling: 1—The piece’s disposition maintains Wang’s consistent gentle killer disposition. 2—The piece actualizes site-specific choices, and is confrontational as well as transformational, that can’t be anticipated. 3—The piece actualized a trans-version and a trans-formation, very resourceful, brimming with a fierce feeling for the absurd. 4—Photos and content describing the piece maintain visual art archival standards.
Then 8 minutes later,
9:18 Flaming Wind: Brief and to the point! I understand performance art language as a system, a series of possibilities of formal and symbolic structures, single symbols can deviate from what the artist wanted them to describe, and can seem unrelated. But when you put these simple symbols together (including what happens before and after, and site specific visuals) you can see the genesis of a contained language system.
This strand goes away, with a nod from Zhou Bin, and also a humble remark by the artist of whose artwork Flaming Wind and Bin had been speaking.
Then, at 9:35, Zhou Bin：( in response to Dong Dong at 9:30: That makes sense, that after gaining popularity, the vanguard dissipates.) Right. So we’ve got to be vigilant, because the preachers insist we go in direction of wide range understanding and approval. It’ll make art a mere sensationalism.
A minute later, Gua.zi, (also in response to Dong Dong’s same post), at 9:36: It’s also possible that the avant-garde is already dissipated. We’ve virtually created a complete language of performance art criticism, whereas the avante-garde, in my opinion, can’t be hijacked like that. You can’t categorize it.
《Meat Insect-Landscape Scroll》Zhou Bin, Performance Art, 2007, Sichuan
Today we focus on Zhou Bin (周斌), by looking at a couple threads in the forum.
Artists had been cuing in since 8 pm, tho nobody said much until Dong Dong jumped in with a criterium for performance art: “I feel this piece is very interesting, to use the body’s crafty style to change out another feeling.”
Then, next post,
8:50 Zhou Bin: Today let's talk about the language of performance art.
Next post is unrelated,
8:50 Gua.zi : We’re absolutely safe.
It was hard to get a handle on forum threads. A strange multi-tracking of thought and real time dis-connection between artists spaces out the reader.
8:56 Zhou Bin: Performance artists should be vigilant against “fever”, and peacefully return to performance art language experimentation. It’s important.
After three minutes of furious and fragmented posting, none of which addressed Zhou Bin’s “fever”, he showed up with defined terms.
8:59 Zhou Bin: This kind of “fever”, in Chinese medicine means acute break out, of which a fever (elevated body temperature) is the main symptom.
9:03 Zhang Dong Dong: Your view is very important. Though, say, criticism today seldom focuses on performance art, and performance, its own inertia, is a clear problem.
This last comment by Dong Dong is an unclear response to Zhou Bin’s “fever”.
9:10 Zhou Bin: (in response to 8:52, Flaming Wind: Brother Zhou, can you analyze, with performance language, Wang Ting’s 《Warm Oneself》)？ 《Warm Oneself》gives me the initial feeling: 1—The piece’s disposition maintains Wang’s consistent gentle killer disposition. 2—The piece actualizes site-specific choices, and is confrontational as well as transformational, that can’t be anticipated. 3—The piece actualized a trans-version and a trans-formation, very resourceful, brimming with a fierce feeling for the absurd. 4—Photos and content describing the piece maintain visual art archival standards.
Then 8 minutes later,
9:18 Flaming Wind: Brief and to the point! I understand performance art language as a system, a series of possibilities of formal and symbolic structures, single symbols can deviate from what the artist wanted them to describe, and can seem unrelated. But when you put these simple symbols together (including what happens before and after, and site specific visuals) you can see the genesis of a contained language system.
This strand goes away, with a nod from Zhou Bin, and also a humble remark by the artist of whose artwork Flaming Wind and Bin had been speaking.
Then, at 9:35, Zhou Bin：( in response to Dong Dong at 9:30: That makes sense, that after gaining popularity, the vanguard dissipates.) Right. So we’ve got to be vigilant, because the preachers insist we go in direction of wide range understanding and approval. It’ll make art a mere sensationalism.
A minute later, Gua.zi, (also in response to Dong Dong’s same post), at 9:36: It’s also possible that the avant-garde is already dissipated. We’ve virtually created a complete language of performance art criticism, whereas the avante-garde, in my opinion, can’t be hijacked like that. You can’t categorize it.
………………
