touring projects
In China, wandering was celebrated - "To 'wander' is the Taoist code word for becoming ecstatic," writes a scholar - but arriving was sometimes regarded with ambiguity. One of the eighth-century poet Li Po's compositions is titled On Visiting a Taoist Master in the Tai-T'ien Mountains and Not Finding Him, a common theme in Chinese poetry then.
REBECCA SOLNIT Wanderlust: A History Of Walking
ABOUT THESE PROJECTS
This is a combined project to develop and produce two simultaneous tours of work by the Chinese artist He Yun Chang: one, Touring Round Great Britain With A Rock, a
touring performance involving a walking circumambulation of Great Britain, the other, He Yun Chang: Works, a touring exhibition of photographic documentation of previous performance works. The performance tour is commissioned and managed by amino, Newcastle upon Tyne, and the tour of photographic documentation is produced and managed by Spacex, Exeter. 
HE YUN CHANG
Beijing based artist He Yun Chang is arguably the leading performance artist presently working in China. Over the last eleven years he has created a series of unique and discrete solo performances in which he has placed exceptional physical demands upon himself both in terms of his strength and endurance. These works, mostly performed in public, though occasionally only observed by a camera operator, commonly astound audiences with their simple ambition combined with the difficulty of their implementation and, ultimately, their apparent futility. These aspects of his work are conveyed with startling directness and translucence in the titles and descriptions he gives them, for example:
Casting
Date: April 23-24, 2004
Venue: Art Gallery, Beijing
Process: He Yun Chang will cast himself inside a cement block and stay there for 24 hours.
Materials: Two tons of cement and sand, steel, etc.
Moving a Mountain
Time: February 26, 1999
Venue: Lianghe, Yunnan, China
Process: He Yun Chang ties a mountain with a wooden stick and strings, then he vigorously pulled it for 30 minutes. As the earth rotates 1670 kilometers per hour, the mountain moved eastbound for 835 kilometers after 30 minutes.
Eyesight Test
Date: November 27, 2003
Venue: Beijing, P. R. China
Event: He Yun Chang fixed his eyes on 1 10,000W light for 60 minutes to make his eyesight become worse.
Materials: 1. A stainless mirror, 2. 256 lights, 3 A cast-iron chair, 4. A figure of eyesight testing
As with most performance works, He Yun Chang's works are temporary, transient and fleeting in their presence. His awareness of this has led him to develop an unusually well considered approach to photographic and video documentation which becomes the permanent trace of the temporary work. This is the essential significance of the combined tours.
He Yun Chang's documentation work has been shown widely in China but rarely outside of that country and he has performed abroad only three times, twice in the USA, with both performances taking place within a short space of time from each other, and once in the UK, in Newcastle upon Tyne. This project will undoubtedly raise the profile of a major artist not previously exhibited in the UK. The combination of all of the elements of this project and the specific timing of all its aspects have been planned to attract the highest audience figures and maximise media attention.
He Yun Chang, Dragon Fish, Newcastle upon Tyne 2006 | photo Ben Ponton
TOURING ROUND GREAT BRITAIN WITH A ROCK
september 2006 - january 2007
Touring Round Great Britain With A Rock is a major work in terms of ambition and scale, and is the largest scale work undertaken by the artist in the whole of his career. It is set to become a landmark project in the history of durational performance art placing He Yun Chang firmly amongst the most significant performance artists of the last fifty years. As a touring work, it is the performance itself that becomes the tour.
Starting at a point on the coast of the island of Great Britain, He Yun Chang will casually select a rock about the size of a house brick or rugby ball and set off to carry it around Great Britain in a counter clockwise direction, returning the rock to the exact location from where it was taken. The walk will start at a point on the Northumberland coast, close to the village of Rock. The route will be a rough circumnavigation of Great Britain, rather than following the precise periphery, a distance of some 4800 kilometres (3000 miles) and will take 120 days.
The conceptual framework that He Yun Chang has constructed for this performance work is described by him as, "motive and concept: The work will make an attempt to represent the iron will of an individual and the living conditions of his being with simple and pure methods, and criticize the current trend of mass culture and the mainstream of its values excessively pursuing physical benefits in worship. In a global view, the current mainstream of values has engendered a solo of so called 'healthy values' or a thin multiple of compromises, which is shown as the compromise between autocracy and instincts in some areas and the compromise between habits of custom and instincts in the other areas. An artist may provide the other possibilities of individual interests and a wide space of imagination while making clear to all kinds of strong forms of individual values even though it may not change the mainstream of society rapidly. Intention: (1)The living condition of individual: Challenging the mainstream of current values such as efficiency, health, etc with a performance of invalidity.(2) Lessening the element of technique: A work of perform art should be the natural reflections of body and psyche of an artist while he set himself in a specific condition.it is different from movie .drama.dance .music and other performance."
The route of the walk will take in Liverpool and Exeter, passing through to coincide with the exhibitions of the artist's photographic work at the Liverpool Biennial and Spacex, Exeter, forming a natural point of contact with the artist's own history and the significance of the documentation of his work against the transience of its execution.
The walk will be comprehensively documented with still photography and up to four hours of video documentation per day. Following completion of the walk, this will be archived and made available for future exhibition. The video footage will be edited to create a DVD production of the project in collaboration with the artist.
HE YUN CHANG: WORKS
16 September - 26 November 2006
Liverpool Biennial, 2 Jordan Street, Liverpool, L1
7 October - 2 December 2006
Spacex, 45 Preston Street, Exeter, EX1 1DF
He Yun Chang: Casting, Beijing Tokyo Art Projects, Beijing, 2004
Spacex is curating and organising the first solo exhibition of work by He Yun Chang. The exhibition will be dual sited taking place simultaneously at Spacex, Exeter, and as part of the Liverpool Biennial, the major visual arts event of this year's calendar. The shows will comprise large-scale photographic work and films by the artist taken from a series of extreme physical performances often based around Chinese mythology and ideas deeply ingrained in Chinese aesthetics with some earlier work referring to well-known ancient legends. The exhibition will explore extremities in practice within live art and in the practice of one artist. This will be the first exhibition of the artist's work in the UK and will give audiences an extremely rare opportunity to see the artist's work outside of China.
THE ORIGINATION OF THIS PROJECT
For the past two decades China has undertaken remarkable economic, social and cultural transformations. These changes have shaped the development of experimental art. Using media ranging from painting and sculpture to video and photographs, China's experimental artists have explored the dynamics of emerging modernity in a country where the forces of tradition still retain enormous power. Photography and video have become increasingly important means of individual expression and are now central to contemporary Chinese art. In many ways the versatility and instantaneous nature of these media have become synonymous with the rapidity of change in China.
Photography was largely reduced to a propaganda tool during the first thirty years of the People's Republic, but from the 1980s artists began to explore the mediums expressive potential. In the mid-1990s, Chinese photography and video entered a new phase of non-stop invention, abundant production, multi-faceted experimentation and cross-fertilisation with other art forms.
VICTORIA & ALBERT MUSEUM
Between Past and Future: New Photography and Video from China
(2005 exhibition programme note)
Although Chinese performance caught the world's attention in the late 1980s through the activities of the 'Tiananmen generation' of artists, it has only recently been recognised as a distinct artistic practice in China. However, live art is still unrecognised and supported by a Government that views it with extreme caution, and this means that artists are only rarely invited to participate in arts events in China, and often remain unknown in the rest of the world. However, despite this marginalised status, China has some of the most challenging and innovative live art in the world that deserves an international platform.
SHU YANG and others
China Live: Reflections on contemporary performance art
In 1967, the year in which He Yun Chang was born, Richard Long made A Line Made by Walking, a path through the centre of a meadow drawn with his feet and presented as a tangible artwork in the form of a photograph. "Long's work was ambiguous: was A Line Made By Walking a performance of which the line was a residual trace, or a sculpture - the line - of which the photograph was documentation. or was the photograph the work of art, or all of these?"
(Rebecca Solnit Wanderlust).
Ironically, He Yun Chang seems to have no knowledge of Richard Long or his work. Nevertheless, in the bearing of the rock, its removal and exact return, He Yun Chang demonstrates with elegant simplicity the ambiguity of landscape in the human psyche: its apparent permanence, its subtle reformation and need for restoration. This has clear parallels with land art and, beyond this, sculpture. His work and in particular his proposed long walk, resonates strongly with the considerable lineage of peripatetic, task based, physically demanding, durational performance work preceding him, including such artists as Stanley Brouwn, Joseph Beuys, Teiching Hsieh, Hamish Fulton, Alistair MacLennan, Ulay and Abramovic, André Stitt, Billy X Curmano, Vito Acconci, Mona Hatoum, Tim Brennan, Sophie Calle, Francis Alÿs and Lone Twin.
As pointed out by Colin Chinnery (former arts manager, British Council, Beijing), the rise of performance/live art in China is a recent phenomenon with artists harking back to performance art where the body is the site, where notions of corporeality and the visceral nature of the body as physical matter are explored.
Touring Round Great Britain With A Rock is a journey of endurance, the testing of which upon He Yun Chang's body as a site within a transient setting and it's tied relationship to a mundane inanimate natural object, is, perhaps, the quintessence of the work. As much as anything, it is a figure moving in the landscape, and carrying a small part of the landscape with him. It is a heroic task that denies its own heroism and in this, is analogous to the walks of Gandhi, Satish Kumar and, contemporaneously, Steve Vaught, the former US marine currently walking across America. It also has parallels with the exposition of heroic ambition as a confrontation of futility that informs much of the film work of Werner Herzog. In 1974, in a shaman-like act to keep her alive, Herzog himself undertook a long walk from Munich to Paris to visit Lotte Eisner, who had just suffered a massive stroke (he was successful).
...I went to Madame Eisner, she was still tired and marked by her illness. Someone must have told her on the phone that I had come on foot, I didn't want to mention it. I was embarrassed... In the embarrassment a thought passed through my head, and, since the situation was strange anyway, I told her. Together, I said, we shall both boil fire and stop fish. Then she looked at me and smiled very delicately... I said to her, open the window, from these last days onward I can fly.
WERNER HERZOG Of Walking In Ice
FURTHER REFERENCE
a-foundation
www.afoundation.com
Live Art UK | China Live
www.liveartuk.org
Liverpool Biennial
www.biennial.com
Spacex
www.spacex.org.uk
Steve Vaught
www.thefatmanwalking.com
Victoria & Albert Museum | Between Past and Future: New Photography and Video from China
www.vam.ac.uk
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Cronin, Paul (editor) | Herzog on Herzog
Faber and Faber, London (2002)
Herzog, Werner | Of Walking In Ice
Jonathan Cape, London (1991)
Shu Yang and others | China Live: Reflections on contemporary performance art
Chinese Arts Centre, Manchester (2005)
Solnit, Rebecca | Wanderlust: A History of Walking
Verso, London (2001)
Tang Xin (editor) | Casting: He Yunchang's Performance Work
Beijing Tokyo Art Project, Beijing (2004)
Tang Xin and He Yun Chang (editors) | Ar Chang's Persistance
Beijing Tokyo Art Project, Beijing (2004)
HE YUN CHANG'S ORIGINAL PROPOSAL
Rock and England tour
________He Yun Chang performance plan
1 time: July,2006_____Oct, 2006-3-26
2 venue: England
3 process: HeYunChang will choose a place by the British coast to start and pick up a rock casually and then carry it walk around England one circle and then will come back the start place and then put the rock back to the original place.
4 motive and concept: The work will make an attempt to represent the iron will of an individual and the living conditions of his being with simple and pure methods, and criticize the current trend of mass culture and the mainstream of its values excessively pursuing physical benefits in worship. In a global view, the current mainstream of values has engendered a solo of so called "healthy values" or a thin multiple of compromises, which is shown as the compromise between autocracy and instincts in some areas and the compromise between habits of custom and instincts in the other areas. An artist may provide the other possibilities of individual interests and a wide space of imagination while making clear to all kinds of strong forms of individual values even though it may not change the mainstream of society rapidly.
5 intention (1) The living condition of individual: Challenging the mainstream of current values such as efficiency, health, etc with a performance of invalidity. (2) Lessening the element of technique: A work of perform art should be the natural reflections of body and psyche of an artist while he set himself in a specific condition.it is different from movie .drama.dance .music and other performance..The rock tour reduce perform factor by using walk natural way and using difficult strength. (3) Indefiniteness:whathow from art,national geography,sports etc probably possible to understand the work but it seems impossible to understand it completely from any angle (4) Multi-dimensions: embodying the work in the nature to provide lots of possibilities of interpretation for observers, different viewer have different piont of view so its idea would be extended.
HeYunChang
March 26,2006
TongZhou ,BeiJing
THANKS
Colin Chinnery, Beijing
Toby Evans (GPS data interpretation)
Chris Osborne (route research)
Rebecca Shatwell, Arts Council England, North East
Karen Smith, Intelligent Alternative
Tracey and Darren, Above and Beyond
Mark Waugh, Arts Council England