Performance Art Festivals in China through an Archipelagic Lens
How might we understand the position of the “performance art festival” as an organizational form within the ecology of contemporary Chinese art, and what it reveals about the media epistemology and cultural-historical implications of “performance art” as an artistic genre? In the early 2000s, the “Performance Art Crackdown” (xingwei yishu dapipan) pushed performance art into the eye of public controversy, rendering it a highly politicized and “unsocializable” medium nearly severed from the public arena—yet at almost the same historical moment, self-organized networks and collective creative practices in the form of “festivals” began to flourish, linking together communities of avant-garde artists that had scattered into regionally clustered “islands.”
This talk draws on postcolonial theorist Édouard Glissant’s concepts of “archipelago” and “errantry”—a conceptual pairing not yet systematically translated into the Chinese-language world—to understand the phenomenon of the performance art festival and the connective logic sustaining these dispersed artist communities. Rooted in the historical-geographic experience and ecological-political imagination of the Caribbean, this pairing critiques a “continental” mode of thinking that presupposes fixed roots and pursues totality and centralized unity. This perspective may help us reconsider the historical narrative of “Chinese contemporary art,” examining how the latent continental narrative within it problematically generates a Chinese identity within the semiotics of global contemporary art to serve the logic of liberalist inclusion—in effect reorganizing the “center” and “periphery” of the contemporary Chinese cultural field. It also allows us to interrogate the effectiveness and limitations of existing conceptual frameworks—“avant-garde,” “action-ness,” “liveness/xianchang”—in anchoring the aesthetic value of performance art.
An archipelagic mode of thinking further helps us observe how the continental hinterland, in a geographic sense, can be imaginatively transformed into an oceanic condition—whether as a spatial-sensory metaphor or as a fold within social reality. From this, multiple threads extend: artists’ errant movements, the circulation paths of art events, and the ways communities connect across regions—even under the most impossible conditions to move, errantry and exchange still occur, with creative energy moving covertly beneath the surface, converging, and leaving lasting tremors and echoes across aesthetic sites at different historical moments.
Building on this, the talk traces the historical evolution of the “performance art festival” itself—as the most vital current sustaining performance art’s archipelagic ecology on the Chinese mainland—particularly the divergent strategies through which each maintains public engagement, sustains community exchange, and builds legitimizing mechanisms for discussing, practicing, and circulating performance art. Examining performance art festivals may help sketch a mode of trans-regional and international artistic practice different from one reliant on the biennale system for “worlding” the global art world. Situated within the dual contexts of post-institutional critique and infrastructural critique, this inquiry continues to offer a productive point of entry: How do communities of performance artists form? How do people and resources circulate through informal infrastructures self-built by artists? How does practice itself continue across generations, and what values does this continuity reveal among practitioners? And what tension persists between artistic freedom and social commitment—between art’s avant-garde character and its social efficacy?
“NIGHT SCHOOL NY INSIGHT” Vol. 70
Performance Art Festivals in China through an Archipelagic Lens
Lecture: Wenqi Chen
Host：Jody Huang
Jul 29th, 2026 (Wed)
Sponsor: UP-ON Performance Art Archive
Sponsor: Nongyuan International Art Village
Wenqi Chen
Wenqi Chen is a PhD candidate in Performance Studies at NYU Tisch School of the Arts. She also holds BAs in Chinese Literature and Art History from Peking University and an MA in Anthropology from Columbia University. Her dissertation research sits at the intersection of ethnography of transnational neoliberalism, theories of the body and performance in the age of digital media, as well as ethics of artistic labor, with a focus on conceptual art, performance art, and socially engaged art practices in contemporary China and East Asia. She also writes creative nonfiction and produces documentary theater, and has presented her work at venues such as the literary journal Aves and the Shenzhen-Hong Kong Biennale of Urbanism\Architecture (UABB).
