The A4 Art Museum Documentation Center and UP-ON Performance Art Archive jointly launched the annual open call for performance art projects, “A4 UPON: Let’s Perform!” Following deliberation by the jury—Cang Xin, Tian Meng, Wen Peng, Yang Yuting, and Zhou Bin—Xiyue Wang has been selected as the artist for the third installment. Xiyue Wang will present her submitted performance piece, “Snap!,” at A4 Art Museum on September 27. The fourth installment of performance art proposals is currently open for submissions. Deadline: October 31, 2025.
Xiyue Wang
Wang Xiyue currently resides in Chengdu, where she primarily engages in performance art. Her practice is rooted in personal perception, seeking equilibrium between contradictions and polarities. She aims to uncover spiritual expressions embedded at the foundational level within shared, latent relationships across higher dimensions. Recent reflections and practices often map the collective predicament of marginalized groups by drawing from individuals’ experiences of being wounded by the digital and real worlds, focusing on resistance that may be inherently doomed within existing structures. Her work has been featured in The New York Times and presented at the Trigger Workshop closing exhibition, the 10th Torch Performance Art Festival, the 11th UP-ON International Live Art Festival, and the T2M Second Space Residency.
<Snap!> Performance
Artist
Wang Xiyue
Time
September 27 (Saturday) 4:00 PM – 5:30 PM
Location
A4 Art Museum
Work Narrative
Snap continues my exploration from Heterogeneous, persistently examining the gaze and power dynamics inherent in the act of watching and being watched. The work’s conceptual foundation rests upon Guy Debord’s notion of the society of the spectacle, extending into the creation of the spectacle both within and beyond the artwork itself. I alienate myself into a spectacle, guiding viewers through environmental setups to observe and photograph. From the work’s commencement to its true conclusion, the audience serves as raw material, unconsciously manufacturing the spectacle.
Technological revolutions (such as the rise of film and television media) and media iterations (from printing to digital internet) have accelerated spectacle production. Debord argued that capitalism has transitioned from a production phase to a spectacle phase, where the use value of commodities is replaced by symbolic value, and social relations evolve into the accumulation of images. The spectacle functions as a tool of social control: it is not merely a collection of visual symbols but also a concealed mechanism of power operation.
In the darkness, I continuously shift postures at my own rhythm, attempting to resist the signified landscape through the residual presence of my flesh. Only in darkness does my moving body constitute an uncoded “residue of reality.” Yet my actions only ‘manifest’ when observed; my “form” entirely depends on the viewer’s material development through flash photography. The simulacrum abstracts and signifies my body into the landscape. Each viewer becomes an unwitting, active accomplice in constructing a decentralized act of viewing, recording, and building. The “simulacrum” of my performance captured in the audience’s photo albums precedes the “reality,” which must rely on the “simulacrum” to be validated and witnessed….
After painstakingly refining, polishing, and debating my approach, I deeply understand that my resistance to the spectacle is utterly futile. In fact, even as the work progresses and long after it concludes, I inevitably become a spectacle myself, co-opted by the landscape. Moreover, my design of the performance elements may even inadvertently establish new disciplinary norms for the audience present. I am acutely aware of the limited efficacy of my minor resistance, and I understand that the audience may even perceive me as part of the spectacle within the society of the spectacle. Both I and the audience will inevitably be swept up by the spectacle. Yet I believe that even in the face of inevitable failure, this act remains worthwhile.
《Heterogeneous》Performance Photography, 2023
The artist attempts to use the body as both tool and material in a live setting, intuitively constructing and conveying the individual experience and emotions of being gazed upon and observed as “heterogeneous” within the everyday. This exploration manipulates and performs the social power dynamics between the “gazing subject” and the “gazed-upon object,” seeking to subvert the inherent sociality and inequality within the act of ‘seeing’ and “being seen.”
《Imprints, Skin, and Silent Verbs》 Performance Photography, 2024
This long-term project by the artist explores and embraces bodily scars through a performance where pain, scars, and imperfections are understood and accepted.
《 Dust 》Performance Photograph, 2025
This work began with the reshaping of factory waste. The artist pounded defective sanitaryware blanks into powder, attempting to break the binary opposition between “qualified” and “unqualified” and restore plasticity to discarded materials. This eight-hour cycle of repetitive, meaningless labor—interrupted by intervals spent replying to real-world work emails—mirrors the artist’s own oscillation between artistic and livelihood identities.
