Excerpt from Inward Gazes: Documentaries of Chinese Performance Art 2012, The Macao Museum of Art, Macau S.A.R., 2012, p. 66: 'The creative thought of this work is related to a rural research project — 'Kunshan in the Making' — that I participated in. Affected by political and economic transformations, the land is now undergoing unprecedented change. During the field research, I discovered that peasants no longer owned their own farms. Yet, neither have they thrown away all their farm tools. The connection between them and the land (space) has thus been disconnected.
Being on the spot, I also saw myself being confronted with a deprived lifestyle. I (my body) stood on the soil but I could no longer draw a connection between myself/my body and the soil.
At this moment, transformation in southwestern cities continues to place our bodies in a spatial reality — one that is without any memory, fragmented. Original individual memory has disappeared, and the existence of the body becomes meaningless in such space without memory; it is manipulated. The way to fight against the erasure of individual memory is to explore the lost memory.'
Bai Zhi Ceng
Online
2011
China
Performance
artwork documentation
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