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M+ Sigg Collection, Hong Kong. By donation, © Rong Rong
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East Village, Beijing, No.1 北京東村, No.1
1994
This photograph depicts a sign with ‘Beijing East Village’ written in Chinese and English. Artist and photographer Rong Rong documented many activities of 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. The sign in this photograph was placed by the artists, to guide journalists and the public. 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 work 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.
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