Talk:Drama360/Introduction Continued: Why You, Why Now, Why Here? ***

to Abaigeal Skjenna:

The thing about Chinese performance artists is that they are extremely poor. Some can not even sustain 2 meals per day. The reason for that would be in such an economically over capitalized country (even politically still very "conservative"), the baby boomer generation tried so hard to try to create a rich country for the future generations, and they had to ignore many things that are considered "not as productive", such as art. The development of art in China in recent decades were very slow, and performance art was very new to China (since China only opened itself to the world since 1978), the entire art industry was lagged behind so much due to the lack of support financially and as well socially.

As well you might have noticed that a lots of nudity and violence was included in her own performance creations (and He Yun Chang's performance art projects), that is not identical to herself though. Lots of Chinese performance artists link nudity to performance art currently. To me the main reason is that the leading performance artists such as Zhu Yu, used nudity and violent as the main theme of many of his creations; one of his creation that was argued and criticized the most was "Baby Eating". By eating a real baby (dead) from surgical abortion (later let his dog ate one too), he tried to use such extreme violence to boycott the "one child policy" in China. Many argued due to the political pressure and lack of public notice, such extreme performance arts were eventually created. Such performance arts affected many artists later on, and they all dimmed nudity and violence as a way to make the public to pay attention and listen.

The most I can relate He ChengYao's article to is a book written by one of the most famous performance artist Su Yong. In his book "The Marketing of Performance and Art", he argued that performance artists should use the capitalized market as the platform of performance artists (2005). Just like He ChengYao said in this article:"However, as i see it, in China's present circumstances it is not the case that businessmen are taking advantage of artists. Rather, it is a mutually beneficial win-win situation...". To her it is about "the sponsors, curators and artists all taking what they can". Indeed, realistically, for the survival of performance art in China, this might be the only feasible way under current situation.

Due to the education everyone is having, many people including many artists believed that everything should be purposeful. Each art project should always represent something meaningful to the society. But the things and problems each and everyone can solve is still so little and so insignificant comparatively. Maybe everyone is just like a "grand of sand in the ocean"? And maybe just like He ChengYao said in this article: "People spend their lives going back and forth like this, using these problems to fill up their lives, until in the end it is time, only time, that resolves and rescues us"? Or maybe, after all, no matter to art or to life, the most important thing is what's called "the process".