Performance Art in Hong Kong 2012: Art and Action of Being

At the beginning of the 20th Century, photography that had entered public life fundamentally changed the direction of art development. The traditional art forms were declining continuously, becoming barren. The ideas of Dadaism and Surrealism stormed our thinking, and were catalytic in generating various new forms of art. Their criticism and negation of art heralded what was to be referred as performance art. After the traumas and the despairs generated by the two world wars, artists had a thorough reflection on the culture of mankind. There were thoughts and also actions. Performance art was born out of the constraints of the traditional art forms. With an independent spirit of resistance, performance art directly questioned the dominating mainstream culture ofcapitalism. The Viennese Actionists, Yves Klein, Joseph Beuys, John Cage, etc. were rapidly and independently shaking up the culture of the time.

The great freedom and liberation of performance art (with respect to the constant subversion ofitself as an art form, the inward gaze of spirit and mind, the self-awareness of the body, the location of one’s existence….) forges well with the tradition of the oriental poetics of China. It is not easyto define performance art but to us, performance art is the use of the body as the medium, to experience people and things and to interact with the environment and society. The performance artist makes use of the process of the action and its result to express his feelings and to construct certain meaning. The art is not simply an actualisation of aesthetics at a visual level. It tries to express some kind of ideas.