Chinese Modernity and Global Biopolitics

4 The Naked Body Politic in Postsocialist China and the Chinese Diaspora

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . c h a p t e r f o u r The Naked Body Politic in Postsocialist China and the Chinese Diaspora T his chapter explores the body art of Ma Liuming and Zhang Huan, two leading body/performance artists from the People Republic of China since the early 1990s.1 Throughout ancient China, the naked body, or full nudity, was relatively absent in iconography, in contrast to Western art.2 In modern and contemporary China, the naked body cautiously surfaces in art works once in a while. Today, no public platform for the artistic performance of the naked body in postsocialist China exists. Perceived as subversive and perverse, such exhibitions are held in private, nonpublic, nonofficial spaces in the small circles of a fledgling avant-garde within China. Yet, in international art circles the performances by Chinese body artists such as Ma Liuming and Zhang Huan have been warmly embraced by critics and audiences. Ma Liuming’s and Zhang Huan’s works challenge the boundaries and standards of acceptable art in postsocialist China in regard to gender, sexuality, nudity, and the body. Ma Liuming’s performances defy the biopolitics of traditional patriarchal authority by opening up the questions of gender-bending, cross-dressing, and sexual ambiguity. At the same time, his persistent exploration of sexuality and gender identity contributes a broad international politics 72 . a r t of multiculturalism in art. In Zhang Huan’s early site-specific works produced in China, the artist addresses the domestic themes of endurance, cruelty, selftorture , and self-mortification, and creates allegories of the living condition of the artist-citizen in China. Since he came to the US in 1998, Zhang Huan has been funded and supported by a transnational network of museums and institutions in the West. His more recent art actively engages issues of identity , multiculturalism, diaspora, and immigration in a postnational borderless world. There seems to be a shift of focus in Zhang’s art from the notion of third-world national allegory to the strategies of diasporic identity politics and transnational subjectivity. In the original Chinese context, Ma’s and Zhang’s body art most vividly subverts the disciplinary politics of sexuality and gender that is necessary for the maintenance of the socialist regime and the sovereign nation. Their work directly confronts the disciplines of the body in the modern era. In the words of Michel Foucault, there exists a vast yet tightly organized network of control and monitoring of sex and the body: “the harnessing, intensification, and distribution of forces, the adjustment and economy of energies.” Such procedures range from “infinitesimal surveillances, permanent controls, and extremely meticulous ordering of space, indeterminate medical or psychological examinations, to an entire micro-power concerned with the body.”3 This is a fundamental condition of modernity, be it a capitalist economy or a totalitarian state. Giorgio Agamben continues this line of thought in Foucault and unequivocally states: “It can be even said that the production of a biopolitical body is the original activity of sovereign power.”4 By using their own bodies, Ma’s and Zhang’s performances rehearse the production and policing of the biopolitical body, question the modern procedures of the subjectification of the individual, and contest the laws and taboos of the socialist sovereign state. A Historical Overview of the Naked Body in Modern Chinese Art Art historians have noticed the relative absence of the unclothed body in traditionalChinesehighartincontrasttoWesternartfromtheGreeksandRomans through the Renaissance to the present.5 In Greek and Roman sculpture, the naked body is an expression of dignity and nobility. For instance, the most sublime subjects, such as the creation story of Adam and Eve, as seen in Michelangelo ’s Sistine Chapel, depict nude human beings. The naked body is a signifier of dignity rather than of moral depravity. It is an assertion of humanity and divinity from classical antiquity, through the Renaissance, and up to the modern period in the West. Thus, a Western critic wrote the following on the occasion of an art exhibit of the naked body: “In the Renaissance, the Christian t h e n a k e d b o dy p o l i t i c . 73 and Classical traditions came together as the rediscovery of Greek art gave artists justification for celebrating humanity, and hence, the human body, as God’s greatest creation. External beauty became a marker for inner perfection. Saints, heroes and even Christ himself were...