Asia has a varied, amazing performance art scene.
“…in the 1950s and 1960s, that the collective ‘action events’ of the Japanese Gutai group of artists started to gain worldwide fame. These ‘action events’ were performance art pieces that involved energetic bodily engagement with different types of materials—for example, paint, mud, or paper.
[In] the 1970s, when, far away from Europe, Hong Kong’s own history of performance art began, with the actions and installations of the eccentric artist Frog King Kwok (Kwok Mang Ho). Pioneering the practice in this city, he coined the term ‘Happening’ in Cantonese as hark bun lum (meaning ‘guests arrive’).
Southeast Asian artists have turned to performance art as means of responding to and highlighting urgent political, religious, and social issues in their specific contexts.
Every place in Asia, of course, has its own history of performance art, and we can’t possibly capture them all here. Performance art in South Korea, for example, took on significance during the Yushin military regime (in which South Korean president Park Chung-hee ruled using the Yushin constitution) in the 1970s, and, as another example, much of contemporary Indian performance art has a complex and rich relationship to the country’s ritualistic traditions.” from A Brief Introduction to Performance Art and Its History in Asia 淺談行為藝術及其在亞洲的歷史
Performance Art – Asia
A Brief Introduction to Performance Art and Its History in Asia 淺談行為藝術及其在亞洲的歷史 (shortened with links at bottom)
Performance art in Hong Kong and Asia
Let’s start with the 1970s, when, far away from Europe, Hong Kong’s own history of performance art began, with the actions and installations of the eccentric artist Frog King Kwok (Kwok Mang Ho). Pioneering the practice in this city, he coined the term ‘Happening’ in Cantonese as hark bun lum (meaning ‘guests arrive’), and has created performances for over four decades, continuing to this day with just as much energy and creativity. He is also considered by some to be the first ever performance artist working in China.
It was slightly earlier, however, in the 1950s and 1960s, that the collective ‘action events’ of the Japanese Gutai group of artists started to gain worldwide fame. These ‘action events’ were performance art pieces that involved energetic bodily engagement with different types of materials—for example, paint, mud, or paper.
A few decades later, in the early 1990s, even more extreme expressions of the body took place on the outskirts of Beijing, in the derelict village of Dashanzhuang. This became the breeding ground for a small group of avant-garde artists responding to the tidal wave of cultural and economic changes in China in the period after 1989. Known as the Beijing East Village artists, the group experimented with raw, durational performances. They wanted to express individual experiences to challenge the idea of collective social harmony. Although they were performed before only a handful of people, these ephemeral acts were captured by a series of now iconic photographs and videos, such as this photo capturing the performance 12M2 (1994) by Zhang Huan, in which he covered himself in honey and fish oil and sat in a public bathroom for forty minutes, allowing flies to crawl all over him.
Southeast Asian artists have turned to performance art as means of responding to and highlighting urgent political, religious, and social issues in their specific contexts. One such pioneer is FX Harsono, who, in the 1990s, intervened in communal spaces to interrogate his concerns with the social and political situation in Indonesia and, more importantly, elicit change.
In the last few decades, another mode of performance art has also expanded and proliferated across the globe: relational art, or ‘relational aesthetics’, in which artists construct social environments that allow people to come together and create the works through shared activities, building new human relationships. Thai artist Rirkrit Tiravanija is one of the most well known relational artists: his works, in which he cooks food for audience members within gallery and museum spaces, have been exhibited and performed worldwide since the 1990s.
Every place in Asia, of course, has its own history of performance art, and we can’t possibly capture them all here. Performance art in South Korea, for example, took on significance during the Yushin military regime (in which South Korean president Park Chung-hee ruled using the Yushin constitution) in the 1970s, and, as another example, much of contemporary Indian performance art has a complex and rich relationship to the country’s ritualistic traditions.
Performance Art in Asia, part 1
Performance Art in Asia, part 2
- International Performance Art Festival (Asiatopia)
- Awakenings: Art in Society in Asia, 1960s–1990s
- Future of Imagination (Singapore)
- Harutyvunyan, Angela: The Political Aesthetic of the Armenian Avant-Garde
- KAJIYA Kenji: Japanese Art Projects in History
- KuroDalaiJee or Kuroda Raiji: Video Screening of Performance Art in the 1960s Japan
- Kwok Kian Chow: Channels and Confluences – A History of Singapore Art, Singapore Art Museum 1996
- Langenbach, Ray: Performing the Singapore State 1988-1995 PhD Thesis Center for Cultural Research University of Sydney aug 2003
- NIPAF – Nippon International Performance Art Festival (Japan)
- PAN Asia (Performance Art Network Asia)
- Reenacting History_Collective Actions and Everyday Gestures
- Rehearsals from the Korean Avant-Garde Performance Archive
- TIPALive – Taiwan International Performance Art Festival or here
- Wu Hung, and Peggy Wang, eds. Contemporary Chinese Art: Primary Documents. New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2010.
