Blooming Season: Snow in June
He Yunchang
何云昌
Production date
2015-2016
Object Detail
Media
photographic documentation of a performance
Measurements
36 pieces, each 60 x 40 cm
Notes
He Yunchang’s body became his physical material, a vehicle for expression. Whether casting himself in concrete for twenty-four hours, circumnavigating Britain carrying a rock, standing in the middle of Niagara Falls, staring at ten thousand watts of light for one hour, or wrestling one hundred complete strangers in Kunming, his works have tested his strength of will and physical endurance. A suite of 36 photographs, Blooming Season: Snow in June (2015), documents the artist’s body healing after a performance that took place on the significant date of June 4, commemorating the events at Tiananmen Square in 1989, in which he asked people to rub his skin with sandpaper. Works such as these reveal a history in China of shamanic ritual. They also make references to Daoist philosophies of individual freedom, and to the western thinkers, including Freud, Nietzsche and Sartre, who influenced He Yunchang’s generation of university students in the late 1980s.
Accession number
2017.085