MCLC: the art of He Chengyao

[Denton, Kirk]

MCLC LIST
From: pjmooney <pjmooney at me.com>
Subject: the art of He Chengyao
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Source: Sinosphere, NYT (1/20/14):
http://sinosphere.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/01/20/she-herself-naked-the-art-of
-he-chengyao/

‘She. Herself. Naked.’: The Art of He Chengyao
By Didi Kirsten Tatlow

Wearing only underpants, He Chengyao faces the camera, the long
acupuncture needles sticking out of her body making her look somewhat like
a human porcupine. The performance art piece, now a video and a
photograph, is titled “99 Needles.”

In another work, a photograph titled “Opening the Great Wall,” Ms. He
(pronounced “her,”) strides topless along China’s Great Wall, her obvious
femininity lending a twist to the popular Chinese saying that “You’re not
a real man until you visit the Great Wall.”

Stunt nudity or something deeper?

“It’s body politics,” said the art critic Tong Yujie, who has written a
book about radical women’s art in China and says Ms. He’s work, which
explores nudity, mental illness and memory through performance art, video
and photography, is valuable for its focus on a little examined topic in
Asian art: mother-daughter relationships.

“People often give social or political interpretations to my work,” Ms. He
said in an interview in her home, a roomy Quonset hut in the Beijing
suburb of Caochangdi. “And those things are the overall context.” But
mostly her work is intensely personal, she said. Her mother conceived her
out of wedlock and was punished – there was also forced acupuncture to
“cure” her – for violating social norms.

“I’m using my body to take on her pain, to express guilt. What I’m doing
is mostly about emotion, about familial relationships. I feel this is the
center of life,” she said.

Her challenging work has been shown in China, though not often, she says.
It has been more embraced elsewhere. She is part of a show at the Paula
Modersohn-Becker Museum in Bremen, Germany, through Feb. 2 in a show
called, “Sie. Selbst. Nackt.
<http://www.museen-boettcherstrasse.de/ausstellungen/sie.-selbst.-nackt.-/
” (“She. Herself. Nude.”) The collection of nude self-portraits by female
artists also includes works by Marina Abramovic, Louise Bourgeois, Cecile
Walton, Maria Lassnig and Amrita Sher-Gil.

Ms. He, 49, didn’t start out as an artist. Born in Sichuan province in
China’s southwest, she taught math in an elementary school for three years
before attending art college. She then taught art, but later left that job
feeling that, as a young mother – she has a son who is now in his 20s –
she couldn’t combine the rigid hours with motherhood. Instead, she painted
at home to earn money.

The story of Ms. He and her mother began in the early 1960s, shortly
before the Cultural Revolution shook China. Her young parents, who worked
in a pottery factory in Rongchang in present-day Chongqing municipality,
conceived her while unmarried. “They were told by the factory, ‘Have an
abortion or be fired’,” she said. They chose to keep her and were fired.

“My mother was just 19 when I was born,” Ms. He said. It was 1964, the
planned economy was in full swing and the offense spelled economic and
social disaster. Two more children followed quickly.

In 1966, the Cultural Revolution began and Ms. He’s father disappeared,
jailed for being in the “wrong” political faction, Ms. He said.

“My mother didn’t know where he was. She had no job, no money, no husband
and three children.” So began a descent into madness, said Ms. He. She
would strip in public, shaming her children.

“Twice on the street I pretended she wasn’t my mother. Once, later, she
was rounded up and sent to another town,” Ms. He said. “She was lost,” she
added, crying.

In an attempt at a cure, a door was taken down and her mother tied to it,
screaming, as amateurs administered painful acupuncture. “I was about
five,” said Ms. He. “I watched. And there was nothing I could do to help.”

In China, public nudity is generally considered shameful and art critics
and fellow artists have chastised Ms. He for stripping. “They say I’m
trying to attract attention,” she said. Yet she argues it serves a deeper
purpose. She removed her shirt at the Great Wall because, “Women aren’t
supposed to behave like that,” she said with a grin.

For Alison Stone, a professor at Lancaster University in Britain, it’s
more than that. “It’s as if she becomes her mother, deliberately re-enacts
her mother’s experiences, and pain, within herself,” said Ms. Stone, who
has written about women, mothers and art, in an email.

“He Chengyao’s art works are nearly all connected to her mother,” said Ma
Lin, a professor at the Fine Art College of Shanghai University. “We see
her shadow everywhere in them.” Of “99 Needles,” she said: “That work is
an attempt to feel her mother’s pain, but also an accusation toward
society for treating her mother so poorly.”

With her mother ill, Ms. He, her younger brother and sister were cared for
by their maternal grandmother. Their mother lived with them too. Despite
the difficulties, the family was close.

Sometimes there was physical violence between the two older women. “All my
life I was told, don’t talk about the craziness in the family, especially
when you’re ‘discussing love’,” she said, using a term to mean, courting.
“It will stain you. People fear it will affect the next generation.” To
this day, she said, there is little help for the mentally ill in China.

“Today I wonder if other people think I’m mad for doing what I do. It’s a
question of how you judge things,” Ms. He said.

[Courtesy of He Chengyao In “Public Broadcast Exercises,” He Chengyao
wrapped herself in tape and danced to music for collective calisthenics,
slowly loosening and breaking the bonds in a demonstration of liberation.]

In another performance art piece (with the exception of “Opening the Great
Wall”, which she said was spontaneous, Ms. He stages scheduled
performances or exhibitions) called “Public Broadcast Exercises,” she
bound herself in red-and-white tape and performed the collective
calisthenics known to every Chinese. Once mandatory, they are falling out
of fashion but still take place at state schools and some workplaces. The
work expresses physical and mental restrictions, she said. Sometimes the
tapes loosened or snapped, “But the point was to be tied up,” she said.

Today, she’s focusing on memory and time, sometimes using needles, to
puncture cards in meditative works that point to her growing interest in
Buddhism.

“I feel that the works I do are for my grandmother, for my mother. Not for
myself,” she said. “I feel they are speaking through my body and I have to
speak for them. They don’t have the opportunity.”