Filming the Live: Performance Art Documentation and Avant-Garde Film Archives
At dusk, the heavy rain has just ended at my first visit to the UP-ON Performance Art Archive. I saw a set of DVDs from NIPAF (Asia’s first international performance art festival)—NIPAF ’95, NIPAF ’97, and editions continuing beyond 2002. The last archival place I saw these DVDs was at National Gallery Singapore. I did not expect that a collection of NIPAF video documentation would also be preserved here in Chengdu.
I asked Zhou Bin, “Where did these DVDs come from?”He said that Seiji Shimoda had brought them to him.
Gradually I began to realize that the video archives of Sinophone live art are scattered like an archipelago across nation states and institutions. These moving images may be held in museums, film archives, libraries, artists’ studios, or private homes. They may also survive only on a videotape, a disc, a hard drive, or somewhere on Youtube Channels.
I mention Youtube Channels because Li Yi, who curated a performance art event at Changye Bookstore last week, said that he had been thinking about whether every live performance art event should be recorded and then uploaded. Cement Park and Feichuan seem to have done this as well.
Live performance recordings may enter contemporary art archives, and they may also enter film archives. Yet in the Sinophone context, it is difficult to say whether what has been filmed is a live event, an action, or a performance. It is equally difficult to say whether it is a “record” or a “documentary film”—in Chinese, whether the operative character is 记 in 记录, with the speech radical, or 纪 in 纪录.
We are always filming the live. Just as we all hold up our phones in museums and at concerts, we also hold our phones up at performance and live art events.
So the title of my presentation is Filming the Live. Performance Art Documentation and Avant-Garde FilmArchives.
The title is intertextual. It brings together four overlapping concepts:
Performance art video
Archives of performance art video
Avant-garde films / Video art
Archives of avant-garde films and video art
If you think about it, many avant-garde films are actually documentation of performance art, and many works of video art are recordings of live actions. Many of these recordings are also home videos, preserved within personal archives of everyday life.
Beginning in the 1980s, these experimental films and works of video art—using videotape as their material and performance as their content—might provisionally be described as a “videotape avant-garde.” In China,this “videotape avant-garde” developed synchronically with the New Documentary Movement of the 1990s, which likewise used videotape as its medium. Synchronically, within another field of expanded cinema and amateur film, the “enbodied archives” of non-professional actors blurred the boundaries between the documentation of performance, the recording of everyday life, and the documentation of live art.
The relationship between the body and the archive is theorized differently in performance studies and film studies. In The Archive and the Repertoire, Diana Taylor writes:
“The live performance can never be captured or transmitted through the archive. A video of a performance is not a performance, though it often comes to replace the performance as a thing in itself (the video is part of the archive; what it represents is part of the repertoire).”
—Diana Taylor, The Archive and the Repertoire (2003), p. 20
The distinction between a performance and its video documentation brings two regimes of authorship into conflict: the artist-centred authorship in contemporary art and the auteur model of cinema. Many disputes arise between these different systems of attribution. Yet its distinctive power and appeal lie in its liminality between live performance and documentation.
Finally, entering this era of the “archival turn.” Especially now, with the arrival of AI and deepfakes, I feel that it is only within these archives that I can re-encounter reality.
“NIGHT SCHOOL NY INSIGHT” Vol. 71
Filming the Live: Performance Art Documentation and Avant-Garde Film Archives.
Lecture: Chenghao Wen
Host：Jody Huang
Aug 6th, 2026 (Thu)
Sponsor: UP-ON Performance Art Archive
Sponsor: Nongyuan International Art Village
Co-curated by: Dongxing International Live Art Festival 2023–2024 (Guangxi–Vietnam)
Co-Curated: Chinese Action Art Video Exhibition 2025–2026 (New York, Accent Society)
Co-Curated: The 6th Cement Park Live Art Festival 2023 (Shanghai)
文珹灏
Chenghao Wen
Chenghao Wen is a PhD student in the Martin Scorsese Department of Cinema Studies at New York University. His research focuses on transnational avant-garde practices, media archaeology, and animism in the context of the Global South. In recent years, he has curated performance art festivals in Shanghai, Guangxi, Vietnam, and Singapore, while conducting archival research on experimental art across Southeast Asia.
