Context

Excerpt from Inward Gazes: Documentaries of Chinese Performance Art 2012, The Macao Museum of Art, Macau S.A.R., 2012, p. 96: 'On the occasion of the 53rd Venice Biennale International Art Exhibition themed 'Making Worlds', I presented a performance project exploring the cultural politics of language, internationalism, and the body. For the performance, I prepared stamps of 'Making Worlds' in different languages. The sizes of the stamps depended on the countries where the artists were born and lived, and the corresponding languages of the stamps are the commonly-used or official languages in those countries. That is to say, the English, German, and Italian stamps are much bigger than the stamps of the Afrikaans, Dhivehi, Hungarian, etc., which are represented by tiny dots.

My one-to-one performance art started with casual chats with passersby who came to see the Biennale exhibition. They were then invited to exchange a part of their body with me — to choose a part of their body to let me put on a stamp which they picked randomly; on the same part of my body, they would then write down with Chinese ink brush what they thought contemporary art was.

By collecting people's ideas about contemporary art in an international art event like the Venice Biennale, I turned my body into a site of negotiation of cultural and body politics. The body exchange negotiated which part of the body was to be exposed, not only as in an intimate interaction, but also in a public space; the size of the stamps or writings also negotiated the desire for occupying others' bodies.'

Alternative title

'Yi Shen Xiang Xu' Xi Lie: Zhi Zao Shi Jie...... (Jing Hua Pian Duan)

Access level

Online

Publication/Creation date

2009

Creation place

Italy

Medium

Performance

Content type

artwork documentation

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In Copyright

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標籤

I-(S) Wear Series: Making Worlds, Fare Mondi... (Trailer), '以身相許'系列: 製造世界...... (精華片段)