In this photograph, the artist Rong Rong captures a reflection of his nude body in the mirror. Two chairs and a mattress and bedspring leaning against the wall form the backdrop. The self-portrait is one of the most famous produced in China in the 1990s and it is part of Rong Rong’s East Village series of photographs, which documents activities by the Beijing East Village group, a collective of avant-garde artists and musicians who lived in the impoverished area of Dashanzhuang in the early 1990s. Residents dubbed Dashanzhuang ‘the East Village’ in reference to the neighbourhood in New York City, which has long been associated with the arts. The Beijing East Village artists explored ideas of the body and the environment, often through performance and photography. Their radical nude performances led to a police raid in 1994, forcing the artists to leave Dashanzhuang, but Rong Rong continued to document the collective’s activities until the late 1990s. The area was later developed as part of the Central Business District of Beijing. The East Village series reveals Rong Rong’s early experimentation with photography, as a participant, an observer, and a model for self-portraits. The photographs form an important archive of performance art and signal the emergence of conceptual, experimental photography in China.