Performance art 7 : exhibition value and making visible

This performance is a good example to illustrate the concept of "exhibition value"(or simply, drawing attention from mass audience), which is one of the key characteristics of the performance art, to my understanding. You can see this artist was just performing some daily movements, say eating in the public space with no different from those domestic helpers who enjoy their weekend in the public space (maybe the only essencial difference is that he has naked his upper body and bare feet). However, he has drawn lots of attention from the mass audience as well as mass media. The high exhibition value of performance art can be distinctive feature, as opposed to the small audience group of performing arts (usually at theatre which limit the number of audience).

Performance 6 : listen to the city under water

This performance is quite poetic. The artist explained that a city called "奉" was flood and now is under water because of the Three Gorges Dam Project in China. In response to this history, the artist destroyed a little part of the road and put a bowl of water on it, and let the audience lay on the road and listen to the water as well as the city under the water.

During the performance (to be more concrete, at the time the audience listen to water), a taxi drove towards the performance site and almost hit the bowl of water. At the moment, one other artist steped in front of the bowl of water, used his organic body to protect the artwork from the taxi. What I can see is the space politic between human body and social transportation.

Performance art 5 : criteria of choice of material

This artist tried to use glue to cover (or "erase) the symbol of the Hong Kong Police, so as to criticise the over-power of the power force. I have also asked them why they chose to use certain kind of material (say, here is the material of glue, and others include washing powderm water, soil, chalk and etc), they replied that their main concern about the materical used was whether the materical will be easily cleaned and the site can be easily be recovered. For example, when the material glue gets dry, it will become invisible and transparent, and thus the performance itself will not affect the physical appearance of the site after the show, and more importantly, the police then will not have evidence to charge those performance artists.

One more example of the amazing use of material is the use of water. One artist used water to write the Chinese word "拆"("demolish" in English) on the wall of Hong Kong City Hall, in where supposingly it is too grand and too exposing to write sometime on it. However, since he understood the powerful characteristic of water---visible and then invisible, any authority can never catch him regarding to any kind of law. How clever are the artists in the use of materials!!

Performance art 4 : stock as ass

This performanace is called "the stock market". Reminded that the Cantonese pronounciation of the word "stock" is similar to the body part of the "ass", and thus this performance artist played with this language confusion(he fed something into his ass) , in order to parody the stock market, as well as maybe the economic crisis of 1997.

Performance art3 : brain-washing writing

This group of performance artists (Project 226) used seven different colour pens to write some repeated naive sentences (i.e. I will never do something you don't like again, I will obey all your instruction from now on), as if we were in childwood being punished to copy writing something many times because we have done something wrong. This performance expressed the asymmetrical distribution of power---between the over-power authority(say police power) and passive citizens.

Performace art 2 : city and sickness

This performance artist explained that his choice of the use of medical materials showed his mental condition to the city he belong to. He feels SICK of Hong Kong. On each of the medical packs (please see the photo), he wrote down some of names of the most controversial and old street---that has already been so-called re-developed (or some may put it as being destoyed)---plus add the word "NEW" to each of those street name on the medical packs.

performance art 1: picnic in public space

This performance
intentionally "hijacked" the public space. The performance artists used chalks to write on the floor of the public space. Some of the words were "picnic in the public space". They were eating, playing music, sleep and etc in the site, in order to challenge the "over-authority" of Hong Kong Government , with regard to Public Space. I have asked those artists why the colour tone of thier decoration were mainly white, and replied that the use of white colour implied the colour (or maybe variety and richness) of the public space is fading, losing its colour. That maybe helps to show how they react to the demolishment of queen pier.