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M+ Sigg Collection, Hong Kong. By donation, © Rong Rong
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East Village, Beijing, No.43 北京東村, No.43
1995
In this photograph, the artists Ma Liuming and Zhang Huan perform The Third Contact (1995), sitting naked in a bathtub filled with water, covered with tufts of hair. The artists groomed themselves in a bathroom before stepping into the tub and eventually lying in bed. They were part of the Beijing East Village group, who were active in the impoverished area of Dashanzhuang in the early 1990s. Unlike most of the group’s performances, The Third Contact took place in a comfortable apartment in Beijing’s Diplomatic Residence Compound.
Artist and photographer Rong Rong is known for his documentation of the performances and activities of the Beijing East Village. 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 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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