Since the late 1980s, contemporary Chinese artists have adapted video as a medium to closely examine cultural conditions and ephemeron within all levels of society. Resulting works of video and performance documentation detail urban change and deconstruct modern Chinese notions of “truth” and “reality.” These projects may be understood as ephemeral not only in terms of their media-specific form (the moving image), but also when employed by artists to remember spaces, structures, and environments otherwise dismantled or forgotten within the context of China’s modern social transformation.  

Ephemeral Architectures: early video and performance art from China, a student-curated screening series and pop-up exhibition, showcases rich and multifaceted histories of early video, performance, and exhibition documentation from the 1990s and early 2000s. Program content comes from University of Chicago’s Harrie A. Vanderstappen Distinguished Service Professor Wu Hung’s newly digitized archive of Chinese video and performance art. Engaging in curation as research, this student led collaboration explores intersections between the creation and exhibition of early Chinese video and performance art. Ephemeral Architectures also seeks to underscore ways in which the birth and maturation of Chinese video and performance art closely aligns with China’s globalizing urban contexts and unique economic conditions. 

Materials featured in the screening series and conjunctive pop-up exhibition channel collective sensitivities towards the everyday, the passage of time, and the monotony of daily experiences. These moving image works interrogate the “real” through direct application of the media. In this way, time is both invented and rendered visible—works expand, stretch, speed-up and slow down the viewer’s experience of time. Video has allowed artists to articulate ideas beyond the restrictions of traditional media, and record concerns and experiences otherwise incommunicable. Unlike realist painting, video invites viewers to activate the very process of visual reception and engagement within spaces of exhibition. It is important to note that a common Chinese translation for “video art” is luxiang yishu. While lu denotes recording or copying, the second word xiang may be understood as the resemblance or reflection of something. Considering the historical context of China’s ’85 Movement, from which video and performance art emerged, this series proposes that the very nature of this medium has allowed for rich artistic meditations on human psychologies, visual experiences, and understandings of space and place during one of the most critical periods of China’s modern social transformation.

Ellen Larson, PhD

This program series has been made possible thanks to the Center for East Asian Studies at the University of Chicago with generous support from a Title VI National Resource Center Grant from the U.S. Department of Education, and the University of Chicago’s Parrhesia Program for Public Discourse. Additional support is provided by UChicago’s College Curricular Innovation and Undergraduate Research Fund, the Department of Art History, the Visual Resources Center, and the Center for the Art of East Asia.