© RongRong
8 rooms in Performer and Participant
Explore performances and photographs created in Beijing’s ‘East Village’, where experimental artists were inspired by and worked with each other.
From 1992 to 1998, a group of artists who met in the Dashanzhuang village in Beijing enacted a series of provocative experiments – both as individuals and collectively – that put Chinese performance art and photography on the world map. Today, they are remembered as the Beijing East Village artists.
Dashanzhuang was called ‘East Village’ by its artists in part to forge a distinct identity relative to the Yuanmingyuan art village, known as the West Village, which was predominantly home to painters. Although many of the East Village artists were also trained in painting, they all quickly turned to embodied (and often nude) performance after meeting each other. They used this medium to fiercely renounce the repression of the body that had followed the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests, as well as to comment on the changing perception of subjecthood amidst the rise of consumerism in post-socialist China.
The group staged mostly secret, invitation-only performances in their apartments and courtyards. Yet, in 1994, several artists were arrested. Following their collective eviction from the neighbourhood, they continued to work together while living throughout Beijing until 1998. The East Village was bulldozed by the end of 2002 and is now part of Chaoyang Park. Most of the group’s performances live on now as photographs and video recordings. The collaboration among the East Village artists, as highlighted in this display, is emblematic of the parallel and mutually supportive development of performance and photography practices in China.
The display includes works recently acquired from Ma Liuming and RongRong, as well as a selection of photographs on loan from Xing Danwen.
RongRong, 1994 No. 70 (Cang Xin, ‘Trampling on Faces’) 1994
This photograph is from a portfolio of forty-four individual original black and white photographs, taken, printed and sequenced by the Chinese photographer RongRong (see Tate P82585–P82628). RongRong was an integral member of the group of artists who lived and worked in the Beijing East Village – an artist’s commune that was informally established between 1993 and 1994 in Dashan Zhuang, an area near the Third Ring Road of Beijing. The images record performances carried out by members of Beijing East Village and are characterised by a snapshot aesthetic which alludes to the intimacy and spontaneity with which the photographs were made on an analogue 35mm film SLR camera. The title of each of the prints refers to the year in which the performance was staged. The collective’s most concentrated period of activity lasted for just over two years, from early 1993 until May 1995. Its membership comprised around fifteen individual artists who went on to receive international attention and acclaim – some of the most notable amongst them being Zhang Huan (born 1965), Ma Liuming (born 1969), Zhu Ming (born 1972), Duan Yingmei (born 1969), Cang Xin (born 1967) and RongRong.
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artworks in Beijing East Village
Ma Liuming, Fen Ma Liuming 1993
This is one of a group of gelatin silver prints in the Tate collection documenting performances by the Chinese artist Ma Liuming. Many of the performances took place in the Dongcun artists’ colony of Beijing East Village in the early 1990s. Ma joined the colony in 1993 having been active as one of the originators of modern performance art in China since the late 1980s. This photograph, taken in 1993 by the artist Xu Zhiwei, shows Ma Liuming turning into Fen-Ma Liuming, his feminine alter-ego and the character he would adopt in a number of subsequent performances. He is shown in the process of being made up as a woman applies lipstick, eyeliner and rouge to his face. Other photographs (see Tate P81261 and P81264) also show Ma being assisted with his transformation into Fen-Ma. In 1999 Ma described his alternative artistic persona: ‘Fen-Ma Liuming is the character that I have been constantly enacting in my performances for the past few years and whose characteristics are an effeminate face and a body of a man’ (quoted in Marella Gallery 2007, p.9).
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artworks in Beijing East Village
RongRong, 1994 No. 1 (Self-Portrait, Fujian) 1994
This photograph is from a portfolio of forty-four individual original black and white photographs, taken, printed and sequenced by the Chinese photographer RongRong (see Tate P82585–P82628). RongRong was an integral member of the group of artists who lived and worked in the Beijing East Village – an artist’s commune that was informally established between 1993 and 1994 in Dashan Zhuang, an area near the Third Ring Road of Beijing. The images record performances carried out by members of Beijing East Village and are characterised by a snapshot aesthetic which alludes to the intimacy and spontaneity with which the photographs were made on an analogue 35mm film SLR camera. The title of each of the prints refers to the year in which the performance was staged. The collective’s most concentrated period of activity lasted for just over two years, from early 1993 until May 1995. Its membership comprised around fifteen individual artists who went on to receive international attention and acclaim – some of the most notable amongst them being Zhang Huan (born 1965), Ma Liuming (born 1969), Zhu Ming (born 1972), Duan Yingmei (born 1969), Cang Xin (born 1967) and RongRong.
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artworks in Beijing East Village
RongRong, 1994 No. 90 1994
This photograph is from a portfolio of forty-four individual original black and white photographs, taken, printed and sequenced by the Chinese photographer RongRong (see Tate P82585–P82628). RongRong was an integral member of the group of artists who lived and worked in the Beijing East Village – an artist’s commune that was informally established between 1993 and 1994 in Dashan Zhuang, an area near the Third Ring Road of Beijing. The images record performances carried out by members of Beijing East Village and are characterised by a snapshot aesthetic which alludes to the intimacy and spontaneity with which the photographs were made on an analogue 35mm film SLR camera. The title of each of the prints refers to the year in which the performance was staged. The collective’s most concentrated period of activity lasted for just over two years, from early 1993 until May 1995. Its membership comprised around fifteen individual artists who went on to receive international attention and acclaim – some of the most notable amongst them being Zhang Huan (born 1965), Ma Liuming (born 1969), Zhu Ming (born 1972), Duan Yingmei (born 1969), Cang Xin (born 1967) and RongRong.
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artworks in Beijing East Village
Ma Liuming, Fen Ma Liuming’s Lunch I 1994
This is one of a group of gelatin silver prints in the Tate collection documenting performances by the Chinese artist Ma Liuming. Many of the performances took place in the Dongcun artists’ colony of Beijing East Village in the early 1990s. Ma joined the colony in 1993, having been active as one of the originators of modern performance art in China since the late 1980s. In his performances Ma adopted an androgynous alter-ego whom he called Fen-Ma Liuming, dressing up in women’s clothes and wearing make-up. He described this alternative artistic persona as ‘the character that I have been constantly enacting in my performances for the past few years and whose characteristics are an effeminate face and a body of a man’ (quoted in Marella Gallery 2007, p.9).
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artworks in Beijing East Village
Art in this room
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