Between the Visible (youxing) and the Invisible (wuxing): Zhang Xian, Zuheniao, and the Minor Performance Praxes in Contemporary China

In 2005, Chinese avant-garde playwright and director Zhang Xian (b.1955) assembled Zuheniao, a performance collective whose aesthetics and politics resonate strongly with Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s notion of the “minor” refracted over several context-specific dimensions. In investigating how “minor” expressions take shape (or continue to breed potentials) within the context of China, I argue that the trajectory and praxes of Zhang Xian and Zuheniao illuminate the complexity of arts and cultural production in China post-Reform, fostering critical considerations of post-socialist China within the conditions of globalization. Zhang Xian’s own characterization of Zuheniao’s praxes in terms of the “visible” and the “invisible” illuminates new ways to comprehend resistive politics in the form of “collective assemblage of enunciation” as articulated by Deleuze and Guattari in relation to the unique conditions of contemporary China. This essay analyzes three multimedial physical-theatre works by Zhang Xian and Zuheniao, arguing for their specific articulation of a “minor” aesthetics through continuous deterritorializations: Tongue’s Memory of Home (2005), Left Cheek (2007), and Stupid, Dance! (2010). Additionally, Zhang Xian’s ongoing “invisible” performances in everyday life complement his “visible” works to foster a politics of creating, despite seemingly impossible conditions. This pro-generative politics emergent from such artistic praxes and discourses responds to the conditional reality of China and serves to inflect and extend the meanings of the “minor.”