PRESENTER:
These photographs form the record of a remarkable piece of performance art by He Yunchang in the 1990s. Hailing from Yunnan in southwest China—a province not necessarily known for its artists—He Yunchang has used his own body as an artistic medium throughout his career. Pi Li, Sigg senior curator here at M+, tells us why that made him such a revolutionary artist.
PI LI:
So, He Yunchang can be regarded as quite a remarkable figure during the 1990s where people try to extend or enlarge the medium of art. He really used his body as the way to mediate with the society. So as for him, his body is not something he played with himself. He really used his body to test all aspects of the society. So that makes He Yunchang very different from those previous performance artists.
PRESENTER:
For the work documented here, He Yunchang paid one hundred migrant workers to wrestle him, and to show no mercy. We asked Pi Li what struck him most about the piece.
PI LI:
I just think for this work that the quantity is something very important. I think one hundred, one and one hundred, the title, or even why the artist has selected this number is quite interesting. I think it's not a one and the ten, it’s not one and the twenty, it's more like the relation between the individual and the society. So, one hundred people here for me also representing the highly organised society. And the one is the unique individual; here it’s the artist. So, they are like a constantly a battle with the society, sometimes they win, sometimes they lose.
PRESENTER:
Not being an experienced wrestler, it took He Yunchang three months to recover from the injuries he sustained. But for Pi Li, the physicality of the performance isn’t as important as the message behind it.
PI LI:
It's not about the body, it’s more about the spiritual: what your spiritual can achieve, even with very bad conditions. So, that’s the most amazing part of the work, and you can see on that level, this was [really a] dialogue with the very special social conditions at the end of the twentieth century.
