When We Were Young: Chengdu Performance Art 2010-2016
In this talk, I revisit the years I spent embedded in Chengdu’s performance art world from 2010 to 2016—years when I was simultaneously an American graduate student deep in the study of Classical Chinese literature at Sichuan University and an active participant in the city’s fiercely experimental performance art scene. That dual life created a productive tension: on one side, Six Dynasties essays, poetics, and metaphysics; on the other, a community of artists testing the limits of embodiment, risk, ritual, and social critique.
Rather than treat these worlds as opposites, I came to read them as mutually illuminating. The aesthetic sensibilities of qingtan, Daoist-inflected notions of spontaneity, and Six Dynasties reflections on presence and transformation offered conceptual anchors for understanding Chengdu’s avant-garde impulses. Conversely, the raw immediacy of performance art sharpened my readings of classical texts, revealing how ancient ideas persist through gesture, atmosphere, and affect.
This presentation traces that intellectual and personal dialogue—how living between classical conservatism and contemporary experimentation shaped my curatorial practice, informed my scholarship, and helped me perceive Chengdu’s performance art ecosystem as a site where old and new, East and West, continually reconfigure one another.
“NIGHT SCHOOL NY INSIGHT” Vol. 62
When We Were Young: Chengdu Performance Art 2010-2016
Lecture: Sophia Kidd （USA）
Host：Jody Huang
Nov 29th, 2025 (Sat.)
Sponsor: UP-ON Performance Art Archive
Sponsor: Nongyuan International Art Village
Sophia Kidd
Sophia Grace Kidd moves at the crossroads of Classical Chinese thought and global contemporary art. Trained at Sichuan University, where she earned her MA and PhD in Classical Chinese Literature, her work weaves philology, philosophy, and aesthetic inquiry into a unified practice. For twenty-five years—fifteen of them immersed in China’s contemporary art world—she has worked as curator, writer, interlocutor, and advocate for cross-cultural understanding.
Founding CEO of Yan Er Lu Arts International, publisher at Igneus Press, former Research Fellow at Sichuan University, and now Associate Professor at Sichuan International Studies University, Kidd writes at the intersection of culture and political economy. Her publications include Culture Paves the New Silk Roads (Palgrave Macmillan, 2022) and the forthcoming China’s Art of Political Economy (Palgrave Macmillan, 2026).
Works
Sophia Kidd, performing in 2012 at Re-C Art Space, Astra, Experimental Spoken Word Performance
Sophia Kidd, Experimental Spoken Word Performance, astra vi: √2, 17 min, 2013. East Music Park. Chengdu, China
