Positionality plays a crucial role in how we shape our ideas about certain things, for performance art in China, it is even more so. Lack of institutional construction and academic education while emphasizing conceptual and public interaction leads to tension between the artists/scholars/public’s understanding of performance art.

For artists, performance art can be the opposite of a performance because acting or faking is the last thing artists want to bring to their artwork; whereas for the public, performance art might have a connotation of insanity, stupidity, and nonsense… Artists’ strategy of implementing controversial or even unethical elements to intrigue retrospect, and thus sparkle conversations with society sometimes leads to the opposite result. Thus how to navigate performance art has become my focus of research from 2022.

As a person who transformed their major from management to art, and shifted the position from general public to curator/performance artist, I offered my discoveries and thoughts along my journey travel between China and US. And during this event, I shared my observation of performance related institutional practice in the US.