The Hayward Gallery presents a major exhibition of Chinese Installation and Performance Art on (7 September – 9 December 2012). he first major exhibition in the UK to focus on contemporary installation and performance art from China, it brings together works by nine of the country‟s most innovative artists and artist groups from the 1980s to today – Chen Zhen, Yingmei Duan, Gu Dexin, MadeIn Company, Liang Shaoji, Sun Yuan & Peng Yu , Wang Jianwei and Xu Zhen. Comprising 40 works, the exhibition will show significant early examples of the artists‟ work, alongside recent pieces and new commissions.
In China, in the late 1970s and early 1980s, installation and performance art emerged as defiantly new, controversial and subversive art forms in China. Until around 2000 installations were largely unrecognised by the governmental art system in China, and performance art – which had never been officially sanctioned – was banned following the opening of the exhibition China/Avant-Garde in Beijing in February 1989, when the artist Xiao Lu fired pistol shots into her glass installation Dialogue, an action that caused the exhibition to be temporarily closed down. Following this event, performance art went underground for a time, with works being performed in private for invited audiences. While the two art forms have gradually become more integrated into the official art system since 2000, performance art remains unrepresented in public art institutions.
Against this historical backdrop, installation and performance art have developed with a spirit of innovation, risk-taking and independence that has set them apart from work made in more traditional media. In particular, many artists working in this area have drawn on the special characteristics of installation and performance to explore notions of impermanence and transformation. As exhibitions in China always ran the risk of being closed down by the authorities, there was considerable practical advantage if the works were by definition transitory, and where the focus was more on the artistic process than the finished artwork. At the same time, the idea of change – impermanence as an undeniable and inescapable fact of human existence – is deeply rooted in Eastern philosophy. Art of Change: New Directions from China argues that this has led artists to positively embrace transformation and transience as key themes running through much of contemporary Chinese installation and performance art.
Each artist in the exhibition presents works that alter their appearance over time or convey a powerful sense of volatility in some way – from fleeting images of objects thrown out of a box to evolving structures made by live silk worms; from a person magically floating above the gallery floor to a wildly thrashing hose pipe dancing through space.
Southbank Centre is the UK‟s largest arts centre, occupying a 21-acre site that sits in the midst of London‟s most vibrant cultural quarter on the South Bank of the Thames. The site has an extraordinary creative and architectural history stretching back to the 1951 Festival of Britain. Southbank Centre is home to the Royal Festival Hall, Queen Elizabeth Hall, Purcell Room and the Hayward Gallery as well as The Saison Poetry Library and the Arts Council Collection. www.southbankcentre.co.uk