At the beginning of 2026, the MAM & UP-ON Live Art Documentation Center was officially established in Shanghai. The Center is dedicated to collecting, researching, and presenting live art documentation, while advancing creative practice and cross-disciplinary exchange.
Following the June launch of Gouchen, a project focused on the organization and presentation of archival materials, the MAM & UP-ON International Live Art Season—another initiative dedicated to advancing academic exchange and creative practice—will open at the end of September. Through lectures, workshops, and live creation, the season will offer the public a rich and professionally grounded program of art education.
2026 First FICFF
MAM & UP-ON International Live Art Festival
✨is about to Begin✨
This year’s Art Season features a 2.5-hour work-sharing marathon by all the artists, which is free to attend!
This year’s Art Season features 8 Chinese and foreign artists creating works on-site for two days, free to attend!
This year’s Art Season features two workshops hosted by two Performance Art tutors, limited to those who register and pay！
Please save this article and arrange your schedule reasonably.
SEE YOU IN MAM & UP-ON !
Complete Guide
9.24 / 9.26
Performance Workshop
▮ 9月24日
10:00-17:00
Marcel Sparmann (Germany)
Modern Art Museum, 5F
▮ 9月26日
14:00-18:00
Tony Orrico(USA)
Modern Art Museum, 5F
9.25
Opening Forum & FICFF Sustainable Development Forum · Shanghai
10:30-12:30
Modern Art Museum, 5F
On-site Performance
14:00-18:00
Modern Art Museum, 4F
9.27
Art-talks Marathon
10:30-13:00
Modern Art Museum, 5F
On-site Performance
14:00-18:00
Modern Art Museum, 4F
Artist’s Bio
*按A-Z排序
International Artists
John Court (UK)
Jason Lim (Singapore)
Natascha Moschini (Switzerland)
Tony Orrico (USA)
Marcel Sparmann (Germany)
Domestic Artists
李尧瑶 / Li Yaoyao
王溪曼 / Wang Ximan
王彦鑫 / Wang Yanxin
John Court (UK)
John Court (UK-born, based in Finland) is a visual and performance artist whose practice spans durational performance, drawing, sculpture, video and text-based work. Since the mid-1990s, his work has focused on endurance, repetition, time and the relationship between the body, language and material structures.
His performances often involve sustained physical actions with objects and materials, where movement becomes a form of drawing and the body functions as both subject and structure. He has exhibited and performed internationally across Europe, Asia and North America and has lived and worked in Finland since the late 1990s.
Web：johncourtnow.com
▮ 2 × Untitled
Helsinki, Finland，2023 Courtesy of the artist
First: moving backwards while covering a black aeroplane sculpture with white chalk. Second: moving forwards while recovering it in black with a markerpen.
▮ Untitled
Beijing, China, 2016 Pics By：Zhang Zhi Qiang
Fivehour performance on an infinityshaped wooden structure, moving continuously while marking numbers and wearing the words godgobdog on the forehead.
Jason Lim (Singapore)
Jason Lim (b. 1966, Singapore) is a multidisciplinary artist working across ceramics, performance, installation, photography and moving image. Guided by the elements of earth, water, air, fire and space, his practice explores relationships between the body, material, nature and the intangible. Repetition, duration and meditative action are central to his work, in which the body becomes a vessel for experiencing material, time and transformation. Ceramics extends in his practice into performance, sound and spatial installation. In recent years, he has explored listening, resonance and silence, particularly through ceramic bells and vessels, and the activation of ceramic objects by the body, air and their surrounding environment.
Since 1994, Lim has participated in international exhibitions, biennales and performance art festivals, including the Venice Biennale, World Ceramics Biennale, Taiwan Ceramics Biennale, Venice International Performance Art Week, Jakarta Biennale and Indian Ocean Craft Triennale. From 2004 to 2016, he was an organiser, Co-Artistic Director and Artistic Director of Future of Imagination (FOI), an international performance art event in Singapore. In 2021, he organised, directed and co-curated Singapore Ceramics Now 2021. In 2024, he was Co-Artistic Director of PingPong – Singapore and Vietnam Live Art Residency in Hanoi.
Over the past two years, Lim has been working in Jingdezhen, China, and participating in its ceramic and performance art communities. He will participate in the Bangkok Art Biennale 2026.
▮ 仙槎｜Xiancha
Ready-made lantern，2026 Jingdezhen, China Courtesy of the artist
In a ruined hall once built for gathering and celebration, I carried two red lanterns through dust, silence, and falling light. Their fragile glow moved slowly across a landscape of collapse — as though memory itself was searching for a place to rest.
The lanterns became bodies of breath: vessels of endurance, mourning, and quiet persistence. Against the torn theatre curtain and broken ceiling, the performance unfolded as a passage between ruin and tenderness, between what has vanished and what still refuses to disappear.
▮ Tintinnabulation series
Ceramics, 2026 Jingdezhen, China Courtesy of the artist
Tintinnabulation series is part of my ongoing Tintinnabulation Series, developed during my residency in Yixing and presented in Jingdezhen.
The series explores sound, silence, and how listening changes our experience of space and time.
The installation consists of six hand-built stoneware bells. Each bell carries an oracle-bone character: water, wood, fire, earth, mountain, and heart. These ancient characters represent the natural elements and remind me of the way early people understood the world.
The bells are not traditional musical instruments. I think of them as vessels that hold sound and memory. When they are struck, the sound stays in the space for a short time before slowly disappearing. For me, the silence after the sound is just as important as the sound itself.
Natascha Moschini(Switzerland)
Natascha Moschini is a performer and dance artist. Her work oscillates between the poetic and political intersections of the human body. Through choreographic and dramaturgical forms, she continually re-examines how social power relations manifest in physicality and are thereby expressed. Her practice is situated within movement, spatial interventions, and conceptual research. She questions existing inequalities, moving between performance, drawing, and interdisciplinary research. In these contexts, she combines precise observation with a keen sense of interpersonal tensions.
In 2022, she received a development grant from the Performing Arts Committee of Basel-Landschaft and Basel-Stadt and initiated a collaborative research project on the dramaturgy of fear. Moschini was a participant in the „danse et dramaturgie” program as well as the „handle with care” lab within the Swiss Theater Network. She was a fellow at the Akademie Schloss Solitude (2016) and an Associated Artist at the Dampfzentrale Bern (2020/21). Most recently, she completed residencies at La Ma Residency (IT), Studio Meridional (FR), and Raumstation (DE). In 2024, she was awarded the Landis & Gyr Foundation’s Work Grant and in 2025 nominated for the Swiss Performance Art Award. During the 2025/26 season, she is a Lab Artist at Kaserne Basel and, in the summer of 2026, a resident artist at Pro Helvetia Shanghai.
Web：nataschamoschini.com
▮ Agility of Fear
Basel, Switzerland 2024 Photo：Karin Salathé
Should we engage more consciously with our fears? In her dance performance „Agility of Fear,” Natascha Moschini takes up this challenge. Through live music, the interplay of light, and a handheld smartphone camera, she explores the aesthetics and dynamics of fear. The audience is following the evening’s protagonist to the threshold between the visible and the invisible — the familiar and the unknown.
In the playful search for an empowering way to navigate fear, a question arises: Stay calm or panic? Does the unknown intimidate us, or does it unfold a transformative force?
Alongside the performances, additional programming was developed, including an audio description of the piece, a queer-feminist horror movie night, and a workshop at the intersection of text and performance for young adults.
▮ Gespenster
Basel, Switzerland 2026 Photo：Karin Salathé
In “Gespenster”, Natascha Moschini investigates her relationship to a transgenerational inheritance and explores how the past is written into our bodies and our attitude toward life. But how can that which is unspoken be examined? How can one enter an ancestral field whose doors and windows are tightly sealed?
A hand tracing the air, a gesture of grooming, the soft hiss of a steam cleaner — in small movements, Moschini follows embodied memories. Each action delicately weaves between personal and collective history, becoming a ritual of mourning. Smooth surfaces begin to crack, offering fleeting glimpses of what lies beneath — that which haunts us and refuses to let us go.
Tony Orrico(USA)
Tony Orrico (he/they; b. 1979, US) works at the intersection of performance, drawing, and embodied systems. Their practice investigates mental and physical endurance, somatics, bio-geometrics, and emergent form through improvisation and durational process.
Orrico has performed and exhibited internationally across the Americas, Europe, Asia, and Australia. Their visual work is held in the permanent collections of the National Academy of Sciences (Washington, DC), the Museo Universitario de Arte Contemporáneo (MUAC, Mexico), and the Stanley Museum of Art (Iowa), among others. They have presented work at institutions including the CCCB, Centre Pompidou-Metz, and the New Museum. In 2010, Orrico was selected to reperform the work of Marina Abramović during her retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art.
A former member of the Trisha Brown Dance Company and Shen Wei Dance Arts, Orrico has performed at venues including the Sydney Opera House and Teatro La Fenice. Orrico is currently Assistant Professor of Sculpture & Inter media and Dance at the University of Iowa. Their work was featured in Performance Drawing: New Practices Since 1945 (Bloomsbury, 2020), a collection examining the relationship between drawing and performance.
Web：https://www.tonyorrico.com
▮ Like moth, we return to the system
Approx. 90 min D5 Live Arts Festival St. Julien-Molin-Molette, France June 1, 2025
A site-responsive performance drawing and installation responding to former Ste Marthe silk factory, isolating the moth—what could be a symbol of transformation—as the oppressed subject of silk production.
▮ Penwald: 4: unison symmetry standing
Photo：Michael Hart
RISK SceneKunst, Stavanger, Norway February 3-5, 2022 Performance, graphite on paper
4 continuous hours, 3 consecutive days (12 hours)
96 x 240 inches
Ed. of 8 performances
Orrico stands stationary facing a wall for four hours, performing a bilateral drawing through a personal movement practice responsive to environmental cues and bodily sensation. Repeated over three consecutive days, the work shifts from left-hand dominance to right-hand dominance, to a fully receptive state without dominant order. The resulting installation presents a spectral record of effort, with integrated experience centralized and more fragmented traces dispersing toward the edges.
Marcel Sparmann(Germany)
Marcel Sparmann is a movement-based artist working across performance, dance, and installation. His artistic practice moves—at varying points of emphasis—between the performing and visual arts. His approach to communication, relationships, and exchange is primarily grounded in imagery and action. Marcel is embedded in diverse social, personal, and self-narratives, as well as in the contexts that shape them, and seeks to become increasingly aware of these entanglements. For years, he has been driven by the desire to grasp such narratives in their pre-linguistic complexity, to acknowledge them, and to transform them into poetic and fragmentary forms of expression. He is particularly drawn to ideas of fluid mutation and deconstruction, recognising that we are constantly surrounded by visual languages, with their shifting meanings, interpretations, and codes.
Navigating, engaging with, and reframing these elements—and, in the process, creating new cultural environments—is a central concern of his artistic practice.
▮ A single word can engulf you, if it comes from the ocean
Venice International Performance Art Week 2020, Co-Creation Live Factory,, Palazzo Mora, Venice [IT]
“A single word can engulf you, if it comes from the ocean” situates and shapes narrated and yetto-be-narrated time. It offers the unspeakable a sensorial, experiential place and unfolds over 3 hours as a ritualized exchange between a wound body, glass and voice in transformation. Each new chapter becomes a holistic space of resonance, taking shape as both a personal and a public site of encounter.
▮ From the unspoken between feet and head – in conversation with Alfredo Jaar
V. Bienale de Performances Deformes, Mueo de la Memoria, Santiago de Chile [CL], 2014
This performance took place in front of the Museo de la Memoria and as a temporary component of Alfredo Jaar’s installation “La Geometría de la Conciencia.” Both the performance and the exhibition lead into the underground spaces of the museum building, creating another kind of space – one that invites a meditation on light and darkness, sensuality and knowledge. The conceptual point of departure was the Mexican slogan: “They tried to bury us, they didn’t know we were seeds.” A metaphor that simultaneously evokes presence and absence, unfolding a field of associations and reflections centered on disappearance, memory, and resistance.
Li Yaoyao（Chengdu, China）
Li Yaoyao（b. 1994）born in Chengdu, China, graduated from Sichuan Fine Art Institute before getting the Master’s degree in Venice Academy of Fine Arts, Italy. She currently lives and works in Chengdu.
Her artistic practice spans performance, video, and text. By connecting disparate memoryscapes with the transformative self-imagery of the body, she focuses on each present moment while reconstructing an authentic and balanced relationship—one that contains a capacious vessel in a perpetual cycle of filling and overflowing.
▮ Upright reflection
Single-screen 4k video,color,7’56”min,Chongqing，2023 Courtesy of the artist
“凹” is an imagined bodily landscape that emerged as the artist stood upside down beneath the water: water fills the space around the body, while the geometric square at the center represents the artist’s head. It is a slow process of leaving behind the body of inertia. The body falls vertically like a drop of water; in an instant, the 70% of water molecules within it begin to dissolve and gather, again and again. As the surface of the water gradually returns to stillness, a new tension forms between the body and the water. Breath enters beneath the surface, and another body emerges.
▮ Nowhere
Single-screen 4k video,color,5min,2024 Courtesy of the artist
The artist buries her body beneath the sand, the soles of her feet facing upward. A shepherd’s rope connects her hand to a lamb.At this moment, a shepherdess wearing a pink headscarf approaches from one side. She unties the rope from the artist’s hand, lifts the lamb, and stands with both feet upon the soles of the artist’s feet. After remaining there for a moment, she sets the lamb down and slowly leads it away in the opposite direction. What unfolds here is a story about time, about weight, and about temperature.
Wang Ximan (Shenyang, China)
Ximan Wang, born in Shenyang, Liaoning Province, in 1990, is a performance artist active in both China and Europe. In 2016, she graduated from the Accademia di Belle Arti di Roma, where she received a Master’s degree in Multimedia and Visual Arts.
Her practice is rooted in a spirit of resistance and critically engages with issues including identity, gender fluidity, inequalities of power, and disability. Working across multiple media, she continuously explores the relationship between the self and its external and internal dimensions within the context of performance-making.
▮ It Looks So Blank Up Here, The Power of The Rope Is Real
Prosthesis: Queer Crip Performance Archive Exhibition- Tomorrow Maybe- Hong Kong, China 2025
Steel grit, coal cinders, used engine oil, industrial fan, utility knife, load-bearing support frame, safety harness for working at height, copper bells.
▮ Le rêve, dieu des sauvage
MadeIn Gallery 2024
Denim fabric, steel rods, dry ice, water, bass sound, Vaseline, neon lights.
Wang Yanxin (Chengdu, China)
Yanxin Wang was born in Lanzhou, Gansu, and graduated from Sichuan Fine Arts Institute. Since 2012, he has developed multimedia artistic practices grounded in performance art. He currently lives and works in Mianyang and Chengdu and is an Associate Professor at Sichuan University of Culture and Arts.
His practice has consistently centred on the concept of “presence.” For Wang, presence is the ongoing relationship between the body and the history, memory, life, trauma, and people of a place.
In recent years, Wang has held solo exhibitions and presented personal projects at the Himalayas Museum (Shanghai), Yellow Box Art Museum (Qingdao), Chengdu Contemporary Art Museum (Chengdu), OX Warehouse (Macau), Organhaus (Chongqing), 501 Sequence Space (Chongqing), Directions Art Center/DAC (Chongqing), and KongSpace (Kunming). His awards include the SAYA Elite International Young Artist Annual Special Award at Chengdu Contemporary Art Museum (2017); finalist recognition at the Macau VAFA International Video Art Festival (2018); and First Prize at the 9th New Star Art Awards (2019).
▮ Indestructible
Action video, clip, color, audio Chongqing, China 2025
Indestructible is set against the closure and abandonment of the Tianfu and Jiangbei coal mines in Chongqing, exploring the disappearance of individual and collective memory amid the processes of industrialization and urbanization following the decline of the carbon-energy era.
Through performance-based moving images, the work presents memory as something reconstructed and reconfigured. The ruins of factories, fragmented machinery, and abandoned facilities are no longer symbols of labor; instead, they become metaphors for loss and forgetting. After briefly flickering within the overwhelming currents of history, they gradually fracture, collapse, and disappear.
▮ Sha Zhu Yu
Action video, clip, color, audio Qinghai, China 2024 Courtesy of the artist
“Shazhu Yu” is set against the backdrop of the Qinghai Lake Gonghe Desert in China, intertwining natural landscapes and historical symbols to present a desert scene filled with loneliness and struggle.
The work explores the human quest for freedom, solitude, and the meaning of existence within extreme natural environments. Through a combination of symbolic and tangible settings, the artist constructs a space that is both desolate and brimming with vitality. The desert emerges as a metaphor—amid this boundless wilderness, can we find a direction that truly belongs to us?
Curatorial Organization
The MAM & UP-ON Live Art Documentation Center was jointly established in Shanghai in 2026 by Modern Art Museum Shanghai and the UP-ON Performance Art Archive. It is a professional art platform dedicated to mapping the ecology of live art, archival documentation, academic research, and creative exchange.
Centered on archive-building and curatorial practice, the Center systematically organizes and activates historical materials on live art, establishes coherent contexts for viewing and research, and addresses gaps in the field. Through exhibitions and public programs, it also builds an international network for dialogue and exchange in live art.
Organizer
Formerly a coal bunker located at the old Shanghai Coal Transport Wharf, Modern Art Museum Shanghai (MAM) has been transformed into an art “warehouse” while preserving the original architecture and landscape.
MAM focuses on “diversity,” “openness,” “exchange,” and “learning.” It maintains an open international perspective and integrates cross-disciplinary approaches, introducing classic art from both the East and the West, showcasing modern design and aesthetics, and exploring the future of art inspired by new technologies and diverse media. The museum continues to pay close attention to contemporary art with an emphasis on Asia, using innovative curatorial concepts and techniques to transform the museum into a platform for public art and cultural experiences. Visitors can gain inspiration, acquire new knowledge, and enrich their aesthetic lives.
Our philosophy: “Art’s Happening.” MAM is committed to maintaining high artistic standards, promoting public education, balancing international and local elements, and fostering the production of art and culture. Through the integration of art, music, performance, and cuisine, MAM offers a continuous, year-round site of artistic events for audiences from diverse backgrounds..
Title Sponsor
Fashion in a Conscious Future Foundation (FICFF) is a non-governmental organization (NGO) and an innovation and cultural-impact institution guided by the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). It is committed to advancing sustainable development through fashion, culture, education, and global collaboration.
FICFF is committed to transforming fashion and culture into positive forces for global sustainable development. Through innovative practices across fashion, lifestyle, environmental protection, education, and international cooperation, the Foundation promotes the communication and implementation of sustainability principles and contributes to a greener, fairer, and more inclusive future.
The sustainable development initiative submitted by FICFF has been officially published on the United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs (UN DESA) Partnerships for SDGs Platform under project No. #SDGAction60806.
Supporting Organization
Pro Helvetia Shanghai, the Swiss Arts Council
The University of lowa
Finnish Cultural Foundation Lapland
Finnish Cultural Foundation
Host Institution: Modern Art Museum
Curatorial Organization: MAM & UP-ON Live Art Documentation Center
Title Sponsor: Fashion in a Conscious Future Foundation
Project Producer: Damien Zhao
Project Director: Zhou Bin
Coordination & Execution: Ni Jia, Lv Zi
Visual Design: Ding Ling
Working Group Members: Guo Youheng, Huang Jiajun, Lin Yanjie, Peng Weiwen, Ren Baiyu, Soma Sun, Zeng Xiaodong
(Listed in alphabetical order by surname initial)
