Before the festival began this year, I promised myself, after the festival, I will stay in the mountains for several days, the kind of mountain that one could hear the rain.
Half a month after the festival now, I failed my own promise. First, I didn’t feel too tired, thanks to the strong work team; second, many works of the archive need to be dealt with. Some friends said that we are over-competitive, but actually, we just followed the regular working pace of the archive.
UP-ON Art Festival has been held for 11 times, the audience was mainly from the art field. This year, there were two groups of high school students, one in Beijing, established a performance art club at school, the other in Chengdu, organized performance art activities at school. Give both the present and the future to the time, all we can do, is just do it.
Festival Opening Ceremony, GuangHui Art Museum, 21 October 2023
Festival Opening Ceremony, A4 Art Museum , 23 October 2023
Festival Opening Ceremony, NongYuan International Art Village ，24 October 2023
Reality is capricious. Doing things needs to be like water, moving forward through the twists with faith and focus. In 2001, Chinese performance art began to be marginalized for two reasons. One was the suppression of the official system. The landmark event was the “Notice” for performance art issued by the Ministry of Culture on April 11, 2001. The second was the launch and boom of the art market after 2001, which made academic contention and avant-garde experimental art retreat in the background. By 2008, the development space of performance art was being squeezed to its limit. Officially and unofficially, the whole art system turns a blind eye to it, and the creators and communication activities are rare, so it can be said to be dying. The UP-ON International Live Art Festival was founded to build an international communication platform and promote the learning, creation and research of performance art at the professional level. We finally set the name as “live” art festival, to encourage the crossing between performance art, sound art, experimental theatre and contemporary dance etc., in order to stimulate new possibilities.
Artist Alastair MacLennan (Northern Ireland) Workshop
NongYuan International Art Village
Japanese artist Osamu Adachi workshop, GuanHui Art Museum
The UP-ON Art Festival has been held for 11 times, and it is been through 15 years. As organizers, we have been thinking about how can we make it better? In the case that the theoretical research on performance art is even more marginal than the performance art creation, the UP-ON Art Festival has the dual function of promoting creative practice and theoretical research, which has great practical significance. Last year, in the 10th festival, we invited five critics who have paid long-term attention to performance art to participate in the festival as commentators. Both of the five articles written by five commentators based on close observation of the festival, and the works of artists have become the valuable wealth produced by the festival. This year, seven articles by the commentators are also worth the wait.
Starting from the 12th UP-ON Art Festival in 2024, the festival will switch from one year of creative practice based, supplemented by the theoretical writing of the commentators, and followed by another year of academic discussion based, supplemented by creative practice. The 12th Art Festival will mainly invite international critics, curators, scholars, educators and the media who really focus on the live art, discussing the international cutting-edge topics of live art, and some of the artists for the next festival will be recommended by the participants (the other part of the artists will be openly recruited). The results of the creative practice and theoretical research of the two art festivals will be compiled into one book. The benign interaction and common development of creative practice and theoretical research is the truly healthy art ecology. UP-ON Art Festival will devote itself to the construction of this ecology.
UP-ON Art Festival has four insistence: non-profit, international, academic and public. Among them, internationalization is not only the need to improve the academic level of the art festival, but also the need to eliminate the utilitarianism and vulgarization of the domestic art circle. During the three-years pandemic time, international exchanges have been blocked. The 10th Art Festival has responded to the reality and deliberately invited only artists from the region of Sichuan. This year, we have invited 11 international artists and 12 domestic artists to participate. Chinese artists are invited only if they have not participated in the UP-ON Art Festival before. There are many new faces and many delightful works. Unfortunately, the Israeli artist Adina Bar-on could not attend, due to the sudden Israeli-Palestinian war. The world is just a village.
“Eat a hundred meals, accept a hundred blessings” is the growth creed of UP-ON. From the preliminary preparation, to the workshops, lectures, on-site creations during, and then to the tail-in works, the annual art festival, lasts more than half a year. Non-profit is not just a word, but something built with faith, courage and responsibilities, by the work team, critics and observers, sponsors, cooperative media, and many unknown helpers, which happened and engraved in reality.
Before the festival of this year, there were two new moves that made us a bit worried about the number of the audience. One is live streaming; the other is no invitation policy. Our idea is to provide convenience for the audience who are really interested in live art, both online and offline. The result is gratifying, as a niche art live streaming platform such as Zaiyi, the highest number of online viewers in a single day was nearly 2,000, and the number of field audience is no less than any previous festival, and many of them are new faces.
——ZHOU BIN
UP-ON Festival Executive Director
UP-ON Performance Art Archive Founder
Artists visit UP-ON Performance Art Archive
Northern Ireland artists Alastair MacLennan, Brian Patterson visit UP-ON Performance Art Archive
Artist donates documents and books to UP-ON Archives
Review
for the 11th UP-ON International Live
Arts Festival
17th Oct.
GUANG HUI ART MUSEUM
Artist: Alastair MacLennan (Northern Ireland)
Title: In Still
Duration: 40 minutes
Artist: Brian Patterson (Northern Ireland)
Title: Once Upon A Time
Duration: 3 hours
19th Oct.
NONGYUAN INTERNATIONAL VILLAGE
Artist: Sam Tubridge (New Zealand)
Title: NIGHT WALK
Duration: 1 hour
21th Oct.
GUANG HUI ART MUSEUM
Artist: Julie Monot (Switzerland)
Title: Huant
Duration: 3 hours
Artist: Osamu Adachi (Japan)
Title: Bullshit Job
Duration: 30 minutes
Artist: MAO ZHU
Title: Diary
Duration: 30 minutes
Artist: Eric Scott Nelson (USA)
Title: Empty Vase
Duration: 30 minutes
Artist: TANG GUO
Title: History is the trap of the scene, and the scene is the pie of history
Duration: 30 minutes
22th Oct.
GUANG HUI ART MUSEUM
Artist: XU MEIYU
Title: Pair Painting Practice
Duration: 3 hours
Artist: SHAO YE
Title: BOX
Duration: 30 minutes
Artist: 缘定 Yeonjeong (South Korea)
Title: Re’Formancel： Semiotics of The Kitchen
Duration: 30 minutes
Artist: Graciela Ovejero Postigo (Argentina)
Title: ARGENTINE LEADER and The DREAM of The “THOUZAND LI’-action-poem, with a contingent choir of scribes-
Duration: 40 minutes
Artist: Katija Schenker (Switzerland)
Title: Dress
Duration: 30 minutes
Artist: SHI MENGXIA
Title: The Train Has Arrived
Duration: 30 minutes
Artist: LI CHAOLIU
Title: What’s In The Sky？
Duration: 30 minutes
23th Oct.
A4 ART MUSEUM
Artist: YIN ZHANG & SUN ZHENYU
Title: 1 hour closer
Duration: 30 minutes
Artist: WANG XIYUE
Title: Anataman
Duration: 40 minutes
Artist: ZHANG XIANMIN
Title: The Declaration of the Matrix
Duration: 40 minutes
Artist: ZHU DONGFA
Title: Remake
Duration: 60 minutes
24th Oct.
NONGYUAN INTERNATIONAL VILLAGE
Artist: Eric Scott Nelson (USA)
Title: Urgent
Duration: 20 minutes
Artist: XU MEIYU
Title: Exercice de dessin à plusieurs
Duration: 10 minutes
Artist: Joy LI
Title: Hunter
Duration: 25 minutes
Artist: SHI MENGXIA
Title: The train has departed
Duration: 20 minutes
Artist: WANG XIYUE
Title: Stochastic Volatility
Duration: 60 minutes
Participants: EVERYONE
Title: Collective improvisation
Duration: 45 minutes
The 11th UP-ON International Live Arts Festival
Festival Initiators: Zhou Bin, Liu Chengying
Project Director: Zhou Bin
Project Coordinator: He Xi
Working Team: Chang YuCen, Dai ZhouKe, Gan ZhiPeng, Mirror Huang, Li YaoYao, Li JingMing, Ma ZiYun, Ou JiaPeng, Vivian Peng, Song HuiRen, Wei Mingyi, Little Sheep, Zhan RuoMing
Critics: Cui Fuli, Jian LiTing, Sophia Kidd, Ni Kun, Tian Meng, Yang Ran, Zhang Yi
Observers (sorted by first name initials): Chen Chen, Chen Mo, Dai GuangYu, Deng Le, Ding Fengqi, Feng BoYi, Sophie Fan, Huang Xiaorong, Jiang Jun, Jiang YiJia, Li Jie, Liu ChengYing, Tang PeiXian, Ye CaiBao, Zha Changping, Zhang Yingchuan
Organising Institution: UP-ON Performance Archive
Sponsoring Institutions:
Luxelakes·A4 Art Museum, GuangHui Art Museum, NongYuan International Art Village
Co-organisers:
Pro Helvetia Shanghai, Persa de Olmo-ARS CONTINUA, Donglai Art, Gao Xiaohua Art Museum of SWUN, School of Arts And Design, Geely University
