| He Yun-Chang is one of the leading performance artists of his generation working in China. Over the last 13 years he has created unique solo performances in which he places exceptional physical demands upon himself both in terms of strength and endurance. They have astounded audiences with their simple ambition combined with the difficulty of their implementation and, ultimately, their apparent futility. As with most performance works, He’s works are temporary, transient, and fleeting in their presence. His awareness of this has led him to develop a well-considered approach to photographic and video documentation that becomes the trace of the temporary work. The documentation is the agent, not the work itself. It separates the “seeing” of the performance from the “reading” afterward. |  |
Nicola Hood is the director of Spacex Gallery in the U.K.
He Yun-Chang, Touring Round Great Britain with a Rock, 2006. Photograph by Ben Ponton. Courtesy of amino. Touring Round Great Britain With A Rock was commissioned by amino and co-produced by Spacex and amino.In 2004, He Yun-Chang, a Chinese performance artist, had himself embedded in a concrete block for 24 hours in a piece titled Casting. The notion of endurance runs through his earlier work, from staring directly at 10,000 Watts of electric light for 60 minutes (Eyesight Test, 2003) to wrestling 100 opponents in 66 minutes (Wrestle: One and One Hundred, 2001,) and in River Document, Shanghai (2000) over a period of eight hours, he extracted ten tons of water using a bucket from the lower part of the Suzhou River, Shanghai, and transported it to a place four kilometers north, in the upper reaches, pouring all the water back into the river making it re-flow for five kilometers.
He is one of the leading performance artists of his generation working in China. Over the last 13 years he has created unique solo performances in which he places exceptional physical demands upon himself both in terms of strength and endurance. They have astounded audiences with their simple ambition combined with the difficulty of their implementation and, ultimately, their apparent futility.
As with most performance works, He’s works are temporary, transient, and fleeting in their presence. His awareness of this has led him to develop a well-considered approach to photographic and video documentation that becomes the trace of the temporary work. The documentation is the agent, not the work itself. It separates the “seeing” of the performance from the “reading” afterward.
His work often makes references to nature, a theme that he explored and experienced through his recent work, Touring Round Great Britain with a Rock (2006–2007.) The work is easily He’s most challenging and ambitious performance to date, and might become a landmark project in the history of durational performance art. For Touring Round Great Britain with a Rock, He casually selected a rock from a beach on the coast of Northumberland in northeast England, and carried it around the island of Great Britain in a counter clockwise direction, eventually returning it to the exact location from where it was taken. The route was a rough circumnavigation of Great Britain over a distance of approximately 2,500 miles and took 114 days to complete, with the artist walking roughly 20 to 26 miles a day. This work was a journey in which He was a figure moving through the landscape, carrying a small part of the landscape with him. The work, He said, was “an attempt to represent the iron will of an individual and the living conditions of his being with simple and pure methods, and criticize the current trend of mass culture….”
