Walking Out of the Mundane

Abstract

The Chinese economic reform starting from the 1980s not only brought in convenience, leisure and limited freedom, but also disciplined human bodies, repressed human desires and routinized everyday life. Many Chinese artists born in the 1980s have heart-felt feelings towards the fast-changing reality and attempt to find an alternative to the mundane life locked up in the urban grid. This essay examines the performances of walking conducted by a group of Chinese behaviour artists of the post-1980s generation, including Li Binyuan, Tong Wenmin, Wang Che, Yang Xinjia and Cheng Xinhao. Walking bodies, as performative events, challenge the domineering and routinized urban mundanity. In their performative acts of bare walking, tentacular walking, drifting walking and meditative walking, young Chinese behavioural artists utilize their bodies to put urban places into practice and create mobile spaces, instilling emancipatory potential into contemporary reality.

Keywords:

• behaviour art
• post-1980s generation
• mundanity
• walking
• contemporary Chinese art

Notes

1 The author has translated all the quotes from the Chinese interviews into English for the convenience of the readers.

2 Strange Tales from a Chinese Studio is a collection of gothic stories written by the Chinese writer Pu Songling (1640–1715) in the Qing Dynasty. It consists of about 500 tales, which are usually fantastical and grotesque.

3 According to Donna Haraway, the naming of ‘Chthulucene’ is a wordplay on the name of a Californian spider called Pimoa cthulhu, whose name originally comes from the language of the Goshute people of Utah.