Two Chinese performance artists are spending a month living in a glass house to comment on compartmentalized living.
Pedestrians walking through the Jiuxianqiao industrial area of East Beijing will stumble across a courtyard containing a small glass room, in which performance artists Ye Fu and Hairong Tiantian are living as part of a month-long exhibit. Although the experiment is getting mixed reactions from passersby, the project has gotten a lot of interest on the Internet, especially due to the sight of ex-model Tiantian lounging around in skimpy clothing.
The installation is intended by Ye Fu to be a metaphor for the kind of compartmentalized and disconnected living to which most young urban Chinese couples have become accustomed. The glass compartment is the size of an average one-room flat that most young couples share. Fu and Tiantian each occupy adjacent glass rooms within it, sealed off from each other and the rest of the world. They eat, sleep, shower, read and practice calligraphy as the public passes by and watches them.
Curator Huang Yan commented that “we as modern people are all living in high-rise flats like this. Every morning they come out of that jail, every night they lock themselves up in it. People don’t know each other. We are losing the sense of community. That could be a price we pay for our advancement” (BBC). Hoping his exhibit can be a commentary on isolation, conformity, and the breakdown of family and community relationships, Fu said, “China is experiencing radical economic development. People surrender their own thinking to material enjoyment and conformity. I hope our performance will give them a short while to escape” (BBC).
Fu has built a name for himself with these kind of live-in installations. Two years ago he lived for a month in a bird’s nest on top of a five meter pole to comment on the decreased living space of Chinese people living in expanding big cities. The existence of such public art installations is itself a sign of a new, more open China. Ten years ago, such a project would have been prohibited.
This article was published Wednesday, May 23, 2007.
