Why the performance?

This show continues the emphasis of the museum’s program, highlighting the relationship between art and performance. The title’s question signals a focus obliquely concerned with performance art, but reveals the strange and intense reenactments of everyday life. There were live performances at the opening, but the performance activities are now viewed only on video screens around the museum, creating a succession of intimate experiences. Zhang Qing’s Sideway Peak (2014) consists of two screens that show unexceptional and blurry surveillance images of six short people, who in a voiceover relate their private accounts of perceived stigma and social unease. A different surveillance model, yielding a five-channel video, takes Katarzyna Kozyra into a men’s bathhouse in Budapest. Disguising herself as a naked man (don’t ask), the female artist captures the bathers relaxing, and treats her human subjects with a wildlife filmmaker’s naturalism—while also evoking the sensual female bathers of the French Neoclassical artist Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres. In these works, the audience must speculate at what point the performance is constituted and how it might fit the rationale of the exhibition. Is Kozyra the performer, done up as a man, or are we watching these guys perform as they languidly enjoy a few hours in steam and water? Curators Qiu Zhijie and Fu Liaoliao relentlessly draw out such questions; each work adjoins nuance to the theme.

At its most direct, the work is performance art, as in the multi-video document Playground (2015–16). An archipelago of screens shows the teasing interaction of artists Li Haiguang and Zhang Yunfeng. In neglected urban environments, they chase each other around, sometimes butt against one another, or gently and rhythmically rock (and roll) together. We see this as neutral observers, and the duo’s editing of their footage abbreviates raw experiences. A number of works explore this effect in detail. Cao Yu’s Fountain (2015) is particularly witty, and is presented as a video transcription of Bruce Nauman’s 1966–67 photograph, Self-Portrait as a Fountain. Cao creates an extravagant shower against a deep baroque background by expelling her own breast milk; we see a cropped and looped image of her action. In a similar spirit, Han Qin’s Chocolate Love (2014) is a deliciously deadpan recording of the artist enthusiastically gnawing chocolate coating off various utensils and making a mess of herself in the process.