Possibilities in Performance Art

Possibilities in Performance Art?
A Dialogue with Artist He Liping

In May of 2019 at The Yard in the Yulin district of Chengdu, Sophia Kidd and
emergingChengdu curator Cui Fuli engaged in dialogue with Chengdu performance and installation artist He Liping on creative theory and praxis.

Here is an excerpt of just a few minutes in the 90 minute long string of presentations given by He Liping, Cui Fuli and Sophia Kidd, followed by an active Q & A with an audience of over 50 artists, enthusiasts, and Yulin District community members.

Sophia Kidd: He Liping was born in Sichuan in 1893 and graduated in 2002 from the Sichuan Music Chengdu Academy of Fine Arts Department of Architecture in 2007. He graduated in 2015 from Southwest Jiaotong University with an MA. He Liping has been working in contemporary forms of public art installation since 2013. Does anyone have a question to lead into our presentations tonight? 

Audience member: I always wonder what performance art is showing. Is it a creative process, or a creative thing like an artwork? This is essential. Two other things I really notice are expressions of seaming meaningless things, which then go onto mean something. It’s all so nebulous, even vague. It’s kind of a like social media post we can’t comment on, right?

Cui Fuli: I think these two are two  are very similar. The question he asked just now concerned, after all, a process of creating and finding inspiration. You must express it. Or that you already have an inspiration, and then how do you create this inspiration, express this process, or both.

He Liping: Yeah. There must be an idea first, I am clear about what I express. In fact, as he (audience member) said, there are expressions of meaninglessness. It can be said that meaninglessness is, itself, a meaning. As for what to do with performance art?  I think this is the same as sculpture and painting. A sculptor may strive to make a realistic work, and a painter paints a good-looking picture. The process of doing performance art is similar to painting or making sculpture, it is actually an injection of consciousness. I think that all art categories are the same, although the result is different, or the final presentation is different. This is where the difference lies, while some people recognize sculpture or painting but deny the validity of performance art, everyone should have the right to judge for themselves. Why do I say that I don’t put too much emphasis on what the work should express? Because we each have different knowledge structures, and occupations.