Following the Cultural Revolution in 1976 and the Open-Door Policy in 1979, Chinese art experienced an explosion of new forms as artists were suddenly exposed to Western art history. Avant-garde art movements during the 1990s gained prominence as artists viewed themselves as cultural pioneers who fought to rebel against the past and state-dominant ideology that repressed individuality. The first China/Avant-Garde Exhibition in 1989 introduced new national experimental art such as photography, video, digital art, performance, and installation. Young artists during the 1990s like Zhang Huan and Song Dong rose to prominence for their performance art, often staging controversial pieces censored by the government. Zhang Huan joined a group of fellow performance artists in Beijing East Village, where he used his body to articulate his inner thoughts and his relationship to the environment around him. Around the same time, Song Dong also began experimenting with video and performance art that reflected on his personal experiences that were universally relatable to larger society. This essay will argue that Zhang Huan’s 12 Square Meters and Song Dong’s Breathing are two performances in which the artists’ actions embody Buddhist teachings of meditation, exhibiting prolonged periods of time spent surrounded by harsh environments whilst personifying the Buddhist practice of non-action. While contemporary interpretations of these works categorize them as forms of “endurance art” or “political resistance,” I will argue that observing these performances as forms of meditation necessitates understanding their commentary on 1990s Chinese society differently.

Zhang Huan devoted much of his life to Buddhism, from his childhood when he “would go to the temples with [his] family and light incense and pray to Buddha” up until today when he rediscovered his faith through new artistic expressions that constructed sculptures of pagodas and Buddhas out of incense ash, cow skin, and other materials (Guena, Project B Contemporary Art). After Zhang Huan returned to China from New York in 2005, he and his wife began to meditate often and were formally converted to Buddhism by a monk (Dziewior, 76). While Zhang Huan has never explicitly mentioned Buddhist ideology inspiring his 1990s performance works, I argue that many of his works like 12 Square Meters and 65 Kilograms implicitly allude to Buddhist ideals of meditation and Nirvana through Zhang Huan’s action, or lack of. 12 Square Meters was filmed in 1994 in Beijing’s run-down and poverty-stricken East Village, where Zhang Huan sits in perfect stillness over the course of an hour as he experiences the extremes of his environment. Zhang sits in a filthy public restroom where the smell of human waste fills the stagnant air around him during the stifling 100-degree summer heat. The flies that swarm around the excrement found in the dwelling’s pit holes are immediately attracted to Zhang Huan’s skin which glistens with a viscous liquid that Zhang would later reveal to be fish oil and honey. These external conditions contrast with Zhang’s perfectly still body as he sits stationary on a flimsy wooden chair, his head leaning slightly forward but his body balanced by his arms resting naturally over his thighs. The combination of Zhang Huan’s emotionless facial expression and lack of bodily movement evokes tenets prescribed by Buddhist meditation in attaining Nirvana, where monks use the exercise to conquer worldly desire and distraction through a “release of the heart” and controlling body and mind responses to sensual perceptions (Vetter, 63). Contemporary Buddhist teacher Gil Fronsdal encourages the practice of meditation for everyday people today, not for achieving Nirvana but for training a brain’s mindfulness, which he describes as a “training in how not be lost in thoughts, opinions, and reactivity” (Fronsdal, 8). Mindfulness is a skill that can be continually honed and that can protect us from “outer world” and “inner world” distractions (9). Zhang Huan’s performance emulates mindfulness to an extreme extent—the viewer observes Zhang’s lack of bodily impulse to swat away flies or to impulsively wipe away the sweat dripping down his neck while also heeding no attention to the putrid smells or pain he endures. Zhang demonstrates a mastery over both “outer world” and “inner world” distractions as his body and mind respectively seem to ignore these everyday distractions. This performance is eerily reminiscent of photographs taken in 1964 of Vietnamese Buddhist monk Thich Quang Duc who, while protesting the Vietnam War, performed an act of meditation while being burned to the death on the street (Manno, 2). While the “outer world” distractions depicted by the monk are unquestionably more extreme than Zhang Huan’s, Thich Quang Duc displays the same lack of movement, sound, and facial expression while he sits and focuses on his practice of mindfulness.

Song Dong does not share the same Buddhist background as Zhang Huan, but he is similar to Zhang Huan in that his later works take inspiration from Buddhism. Song Dong produced Mandala in 2015, where he recreated Buddhist radially symmetric circular images by painstakingly laying individual granules of colored stone, and produced Eat the City in 2016, where his edible cities which are eventually consumed take inspiration from the Buddhist concept of “sunyata” or the circular process of life and death. Although Song Dong has never attributed his earlier performance works to being related to Buddhism, I argue that his 1996 photograph Breathing is another performance where the artist’s actions take inspiration from Buddhist meditation. The picture is taken at night during the freezing winter, where the foreground is dominated by the artist laying prone on the vast courtyard of Tiananmen Square as the only light comes from the background around the Tiananmen gate. Song Dong would later reveal that he spent forty minutes that night laying still over the pavement, only breathing repeatedly such that his exhale eventually left a thin layer of ice over the concrete. Similar to 12 Square Meters, the performer subjects himself to extreme conditions like the harsh winter temperatures and awkward position over the ground as Song Dong lays face-down but keeps his head continually elevated such that his breathing is visible in the cold air. Song Dong’s sole focus on his breath is particularly emblematic of meditation because practitioners commonly divert their attention away from outer and inner worldly distractions by focusing on the systematic inhale and exhale of their lungs over a prolonged period. Alan Klima’s 2002 anthropological study Meditation, Massacre, and Exchange with the Dead in Thailand delves into the cultivated practice of meditation in Thai Buddhism which teaches the practice of Ānāpānsati or “mindfulness of breathing” (Klima, 155). While the goal of this form of meditation is the same in cultivating one’s sense of mindfulness, the process involves “noticing the active sensations of breaths as they are occurring in the present moment” and choosing “a single point of contact” during each breath (156). Song Dong’s performance is no different than this form of meditation as his body lays still while his attention is captivated by the inhalation and exhalation of air. Furthermore, Song Dong’s eyes do not seem to waver away from the condensation of his breath on the concrete, reinforcing the ideal of choosing a single point of contact during the process. Gil Fronsdal describes focusing on one’s breath during meditation as an aid to maintaining mindfulness and forgetting distractions, where “we counter the force of our attachments with the strength of our concentration” (14). The viewer gets the same impression from Song Dong’s performance, as his focus on his repeated breathing seems to counter the potential distractions felt by the cold air, wet pavement, and awkward positioning.

While modern theorists and critics categorize provocative performances like 12 Square Meters and Breathing as forms of “political resistance” and “endurance art,” I argue that analyzing these pieces through the lens of Buddhist meditation provides a new understanding of their commentary on 1990s Chinese society. Discourses about Zhang Huan’s 12 Square Meters characterize his intentions behind the performance as displaying a political message that condemned the rapid growth of China’s urban areas that inevitably led to poorer neighborhoods being abandoned or less developed (Berghuis, 8; Wu, 107). Zhang Huan’s actions are thus conceptualized as being fully aware of the dilapidation and putridness that surround him, enduring these conditions throughout the video, and thus “resisting” the problems by refusing to acknowledge them. In the case of Song Dong’s Breathing, commentaries about the performance hone in on the artist’s choice of photographing Tiananmen Square a mere seven years after China’s harsh crackdown of democracy and freedom of expression during the 1989 Tiananmen Square Massacre. Song Dong’s actions are conceptualized as attempts at politically resisting this oppressive censorship by initiating a material change, through a layer of ice, on the Tiananmen pavement. However, by identifying both artists’ actions as a form of meditation, I interpret their performances differently than achieving a goal of resistance that will end their durational performance or achieving a goal of enduring an external challenge. Instead, by observing both artist’s actions as forms of meditation, I classify their intentions as practicing mindfulness as they are still aware of their external environments but not distracting by them during their period of introspection. Zhang Huan seemed to share this viewpoint as he would later write “I try my best to experience an extant reality throughout the process of my work. Only when I finish a work can I finally realize what I have achieved and what I have expressed” (Zhang, 214). His quote appears to embrace the meditative state of “existing” or “dwelling” rather than “enduring” within his environment and thus neither suffers nor resists suffering. Song Dong would later describe his performance Breathing as a performance that “seems to be doing a lot, but in the end it’s nothing” (d’Arenberg, Ocula). I find this quote to be a testament to how his “material change” to Tiananmen through a small layer of ice is not the grandiose form of political resistance that many interpret it to be. Instead of interpreting the work as a performance with the end-goal of instigating change, focusing on Song Dong’s meditative state allows the viewer to appreciate his state of mindfulness as he is cognizant of the harsh cold and controversial history of where he lies but is not distracted by it. Some might object that these interpretations of both performances depoliticize the broader significance extracted by viewers. However, I would argue that political significance is still evident to the viewer, and instead the performer’s intentions of political resistance are replaced by more indeterminate and open-ended meanings.

Since being introduced in China during the Han Dynasty, Buddhism has become a dominant religion that pervades Chinese society even today through its influence on tradition, philosophy, and art. One example of its indirect influence on art can be observed through Zhang Huan’s 1994 performance 12 Square Meters and Song Dong’s 1996 performance Breathing. Both artists’ works provide important commentary about the political contexts of a repressive Chinese society and government during the 1990s. However, their performances enacted within extreme environments also exemplify perceived non-action that embody Buddhist meditation and leave the viewer with an even greater appreciation and understanding of the momentousness of these seemingly simple works of art.