Yang Zhichao’s performance art at the margins: Within the Fourth Ring Road (1999) and the Chinese contemporary

Abstract

This article explores the theme of marginality in the art of Yang Zhichao, a critically and socially engaged experimental artist who has been active in China since the mid-1980s. Yang’s oeuvre – which includes performance artworks, drawings and installations – revolves around the issue of sociocultural marginality in reform-era society, from the condition of migrant workers, beggars and psychiatric patients to the borderlands of Chinese civilization and the condition of the avant-garde artist. Drawing also on Chinese art criticism and two interviews with the artist, this study examines in particular the performance Within the Fourth Ring Road (1999) through its photographic and literary documentation. While writing on Yang Zhichao’s art has largely focused on his most extreme performances of ‘body art’ such as Planting Grass (2000), the artwork at the centre of this study highlights an anti-spectacular approach to performance art and reflects Yang’s stated belief in the importance of placing oneself in the circumstances of marginalized people in order to move beyond a voyeuristic gaze. Through a critical analysis of said approach the article reveals a quality that pervades Yang Zhichao’s multi-disciplinary artistic career – that is, its ‘contemporariness’, in Giorgio Agamben’s sense as a focus on the darkest, most emblematic aspects of one’s society and time.