Zheng Lianjie (b.1962). Binding The Lost Souls: Huge Explosion. 1993. Great Wall. 120x153 cm.
Zheng Lianjie belongs to the generation of Chinese artists most shaped
by the harshness and excess of the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976), when
all but the most basic of educational facilities were shut down by
government authorities. Despite the lack of formal education, in 1986
at the age of 23, Zheng founded one of the first night schools of fine
art in Beijing. It was shortly thereafter in 1988 that Zheng turned his
attention to the Great Wall as a backdrop for what has come to be
considered among the most seminal performance works in post-Tiananmen
(June 4th 1989) China.
Between September 21 and October 7 of
1993, Zheng created a series of four performances held at the Great
Wall, near Si Ma Tai, in Hebei Province. Collectively titled Binding the Lost Souls: Huge Explosion Series, 1993 the four pieces - Memory Loss, Black Cola, Cavern-Strategy and Huge Explosion
- took a year of preparation and the recruitment of several score of
local residents and a group of artists assembled by Zheng to complete.
For Huge Explosion Zheng and his collaborators gathered more than
10,000 broken bricks over a seventeen day period from along the foot of
the wall, wrapping them and themselves in strips of red cloth. The
wrapped bricks were piled along a 300 meter stretch of the wall, passing
through three of the fire towers. The funerary significance of the
colour red, which Gao Minglu, curator of The Wall, refers to as
‘A sacrificial colour for calling and commemorating the lost soul,’ was
now used to wrap the Great Wall itself. As Zheng says, ‘The brick is a
piece of frozen history. What we are doing is to bind and compress the
lost souls at the sunset.’
Gao Minglu elaborates: ‘The series
of works involved certain ritual forms, but instead of celebrating the
greatness of the physical form of the Wall, it seemed they were
performing a cultural funeral in calling back the souls lost by people.
In the current reality, The Wall thus became a “wounded” Great Wall in
need of reconstruction and revival.’
While Chinese and
international critics called the performances ‘stunning and epic,’ the
Chinese government held a different view, banning all media coverage of
the event, closing a press event opening, and even forcing the shutdown
of Beijing Art News for daring to feature an image on its front page.