My early years were spent in a small village yard in Shanxi, China with my grandparents, who were peasants. They planted a pomegranate tree because I liked pomegranate. They have died, but the tree is alive and growing wild.

When I found myself studying contemporary art in California and Cambridge when I was in my 20s, I felt impossible to communicate the world and the work I was in now with my rusty earliest self and its community. My art since then has always been various attempts to do this impossible communication, but with other people and communities.

Work


Artistic Research & Practice


Communities: Research & Practice

Originality is banned, creativity is banned — only Shanzhai (copycat) is allowed. Professionals are also banned, our teachers are amateurs, fortune tellers, Chaozhou braised goose cooks, a local Buddhist nun, a Meituan delivery man, village mothers, and sometimes street weirdos.

We learn conceptual writing by shouting on megaphones, we make performance art as routine morning workouts, we do non-fiction journalism through theater, we touch each other’s bodies by joining Mosuo/Naxi rituals and Teochew opera and Yingge dance, we do social theory by writing and drawing on the wall on the streets, and sometimes we dance about architecture as we write about art.

https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/gniCKwCf9puBE9sBVW3VfA


Selected Essays/Presentations


DIY Wiki and Social Programming

@WUHAN Annual Conference of Network Society, China Academy of Art

diy wiki and social programming.pdf


If Society is Programming Us, How Do We Program Society: Avant-Garde Art Actions & AI

@CHIANG MAI WAMO 2023, a Web3 conference

@SHANGHAI Artificial Intelligence Hackathon, China Academy of Art


Open Sourcing Theater into the Everyday: Examples from a Rural Art Cooperative & an Edupunk Community

****@MUJIAYUAN VILLAGE Rural Theater Festival 2024

@ONLINE Community Public Art (CAP Talks) Bauhaus University, Weimar, Germany


Ritual & Art: Indigenous, Ethnic Minority Communities and Social Practice Art of 1000 Years

@JIEYANG ShanzhaiMFA

@ONLINE