In the name of the body: Identity, subjectivity, and the global nation in He Chengyao's performance art

This paper traces the development of He Chengyao's performance art in the early 2000s, from her spontaneous intervention at another artist's opening at the Great Wall of China, to later, more contemplative engagements with body materiality. Addressed primarily from the perspective of Chinese history and society, these performances are seen as an attempt to call attention to and resolve anxieties and desires produced by recent transformations in the People's Republic of China's (PRC) on the level of the body. By adopting symptoms of her mother's insanity and revisiting national ritual, He Chengyao narrated a traumatic past without the use of allegory in the attempt to comprehend the incomprehensible and re-signify the abject. By asserting a localized, particularized, feminist history, she challenged the global spectacle of China and contemporary Chinese art. In these ways, He Chengyao sought, through art, a third way for collective identification, one not based on mass politics or mass consumerism, but instead based on the embodied practice of a critical relationship to history and memory.