Wang Yuanyuan

    FOUR avant-garde artists from Britain and China gave a special art performance at the Overseas Chinese Town (OCT) Loft in Nanshan District on Saturday, inspiring audience to think about the meaning of life and strength of avant-garde art.

    Organized by the British Consulate-General and well-known contemporary art curator Jonas Stampe, Brian Connolly and John Court from Britain and Duan Yingmei and Ge Ya from China were invited to communicate with the audience during the performance.

    “It was an encounter between Chinese and Western artists as well as an encounter between men and women,” Huang Wanhong, media official from the Cultural and Education Section of the British Consulate-General, said.

    Each artist’s work was a strong visual impact and the production process was also poetic. Audiences could even discover the creative moment in life through their performances and be inspired to rethink about the true meaning of life and love, Huang said.

    Connolly, a multi-media artist born in 1961, set up a small market stall at the show, selling some of his surrealistic works such as “Hens’ Teeth” and a few centimeters of wooden rulers and even fame, written in Chinese characters on a piece of paper.

    He was questioning materialism, global politics and social ethics and communicating with the audience by participation.

    Young independent Chinese artist, Ge, 27, attempted to illustrate the relationship between the body and the material world through her work “Gain and Loss.” “I wanted to find out that how much our bodies can bear and what the relationship is between our body and the material world,” she said.

    Court’s work was inspired by a children’s game where participants could not move after counting to three. This was to allow the audience to understand and feel the meaning of time and life, while Duan told her stories about her journey, demonstrating the different stages in life.

    As a non-art lover, Lu Bo, a 28-year-old IT engineer, was impressed by Connolly’s “stall.” “I knew nothing about art before, but by participating in his performance and talking with him, I came to understand that action art is not about the form by the artist but about what you, the audience, get from the performance. It’s like a red light on the road, letting you stop and think about which way to take next,” Lu said.

    The two-day event was first held at Shenzhen Middle School in Luohu District on Friday.

    “The performance was to introduce more people to action art and start to rethink life,” Stampe said at the school.

    Action art was not to provide an answer but to inspire audiences to think and analyze. Many action artists did not have just one answer. “In Western countries, people often forget to think about life itself in their modern and busy lives, but action art is a way to awaken them. Thinking is very important for humans because it is thinking that makes us a man. If everyone starts to think, the purpose of the art is accomplished,” Stampe said.

    “It is a very interesting point of view. In most of our life at school, we are pursuing the one single correct answer to every question. So it feels strange in the beginning that they told us that there was no one answer for their work when we asked them about the meaning of their works,” Han Zhonglin, a Senior 2 student, said.

    “It is a very joyful process to try to understand their performance and during the process, you feel your mind has opened. The result of the thinking becomes meaningless but the process matters,” Han said.