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M+ Sigg Collection, Hong Kong. By donation, © Rong Rong
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East Village, Beijing, No.7 北京東村, No.7
1995
This photograph documents a performance by the artist Zhang Huan in Original Sound, a night of performances organised in 1995 to investigate the idea of primordial sound. Zhang leapt from an elevated highway and then lay in a corner beneath the road, stuffing earthworms into his mouth. Here, he is pictured at the end of the performance, sobbing, with his back to the audience. In addition to documenting Original Sound, Rong Rong collaborated in a performance with Gao Fu. Original Sound featured several members 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. Rong Rong photographed the collective’s activities, which explored ideas of the body and the environment, often through performance and photography. The East Village series reveals his 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.
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