多幕：作为复数的行动 ——关于王彦鑫的行为影像“西北叙事” “Multiple Acts: Plural Actions — On Wang Yanxin’s Performance Videos Northwest Narrative”

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At seven in the morning, under the eaves of an abandoned factory on the eastern shore of Qinghai Lake, a flock of crows huddled together, seeking shelter from the rain.

Inside the dim room, a white shirt hung from the ceiling. Above it was a circular hole leading to the outside.
The artist Wang Yanxin, originally from Gansu, stood bare-chested, his face hidden behind a mask adorned with feathers.
He kept releasing long, stick-shaped balloons in bright colors, trying to make them fly through the hole or escape through it as the air leaked out.
The balloons flitted about the room like frantic flies, filling the space with whistling sounds.

In another factory room, Wang carried a Taiping drum — a traditional prop used in local festive performances — pacing rhythmically while striking it, occasionally lifting a dying torch high into the air.
In a lightless chamber, he tied a series of glass bottles with candles inside to his ankles and dragged them slowly across the floor.
The bottles clinked against one another and eventually slipped through the gaps in the floorboards.
He struck a cow bone again and again, studying the skeletal model of a human body illuminated by candlelight, making it sway like a marionette in sync with his own movement.

These images are from Jinyintan, the first chapter of what Wang calls his “Northwest Narrative.”
The video unfolds like a multi-act drama, switching between eight or nine distinct scenes of performance and environment.
Here, the artist’s movements are cautious, almost restrained — as if in observation, testing how to respond.

The work was filmed amid the industrial ruins of Qinghai’s Jinyintan grasslands.
In the 1950s, this was the site of China’s first nuclear weapons research base, where both the atomic and hydrogen bombs were developed.
For nearly half a century, the place remained a national secret; generations of scientists and builders lived and worked here in anonymity.
Jinyintan became shrouded in mystique — as did much of the Northwest’s barren landscape, long used as a site of political exile and punishment.

In recent years, Wang Yanxin has repeatedly chosen historical ruins as his sites of bodily intervention.
Through these returns to specific places, he transforms the environment into a metaphor for the human condition — a confrontation with fate, loss, and endurance.
His multi-act structure stitches together actions from different times and locations into a narrative web where body, space, history, and culture collide and entangle.

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The time shifts from 1:30 to 4:00 in the afternoon.
Each film begins with the artist adjusting the clock hanging on his chest.

At the site of a former farm on the northern shore of Qinghai Lake, the scorching Gobi stretches endlessly.
In the setting sun, the ruins cast long shadows beside the cattle of passing herders; time on the Gobi seems frozen somewhere in history.

On a slope, the artist waves a pair of crimson fans once used in local folk performances, moving carefully from one end of the incline to the other.
He then unfurls a thirty-meter-long strip of golden wind-horse prayer flags.

On a railway track, Wang drags a cluster of clay jars backward, spinning the clock’s hands in reverse as he moves.
The jars collide along the iron rails with rhythmic metallic clinks.
Before an iron gate, he takes out a harmonica and slowly plays In That Distant Place — a 1930s folk song by Wang Luobin, a classic “grassland ballad” about love, horses, and faraway dreams.
Its melancholy melody drifts across the Gobi like an elegy for memory itself.

As the clock rewinds, emotion floods back through the cracks of history.

At dusk, Wang stands atop a pedestal before a timeworn red building, waving a long, glowing red dragon — at once a victory banner celebrating the triumphant hero, and a lament calling to the lost past.
A freight train rumbles by behind him, loaded with coal; history and the present converge for an instant.

This is In That Distant Place, the second part of his “Northwest Narrative.”
For the artist, the vast Gobi is both the place once left behind and the destination reached again — a hidden geography buried deep in history, a home stranded in the echo of a song.
Here, Wang’s actions acquire a ritual and symbolic gravity; the body takes on the grandeur of history itself.
Nostalgia wells up from the desert like a spring.

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The third piece, Shazhuyu (“Cinnabar Jade”), takes its name from the desert itself.

Wang’s body bends in the wind among the dry shrubs.
He walks slowly across the vast dunes, wearing black feathered shoulder guards and a white feather mask, with a golden ribbon tied to his waist trailing behind him like a victorious warrior returning from battle.
Standing atop a dune, he surveys the barren horizon and blows a horn.
The sound is faint — no followers, no chorus.
He walks alone across the sand like an ancient exile forgotten by time.

On another dune, he releases a giant kite bearing the phrase “Radiant at High Noon.”
He strips naked, crawling up and rolling down the slope again and again — a Sisyphean cycle of exhaustion and persistence.
As night falls, he performs on a burning violin, playing the Italian partisan song Bella Ciao.
“If I die in battle, bury me high on the mountain.”
The music brims with romantic heroism, mingling joy and tragedy.
Amid the desert wind, the artist loses himself in his own choreography — a solitary dance with fire, with the desert, with the night.
History, like distant starlight, recedes into darkness.

From morning to night, from confined interiors to the vast Gobi, from hesitant motion to triumphant movement — Wang Yanxin completes his “Northwest Narrative”, or perhaps his “self-exile.”

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This trilogy of multi-act performance videos opens new possibilities for Wang’s exploration of performance art.
Freed from the constraints of live immediacy, he merges action and cinematic narration, situating the body within diverse environments and reappearing through shifting roles.
Each persona — the festive dancer, the bone-beating protester, the torch-bearing hero, the exiled wanderer — enriches the work’s layers of meaning and theatrical complexity.

From Fukushima to Fuxian Lake in Yunnan, from abandoned coal plants in Chongqing to the desolate Gobi of the Northwest, every site Wang selects carries distinct local and historical dimensions.
Yet he never treats them as mere research subjects or narrative backgrounds.
Rather, he translates place into condition — probing how human beings perceive and act within it.
His gestures are ghostly, absurd, poetic, and symbolic — sometimes heroic, sometimes surreal.

He incorporates local debris and folk props, familiar popular music, and elements of ritual, giving his performances a theatrical illusion.
Unlike conventional “performance,” Wang’s actions (xingdong) possess a sharper intentionality and public resonance.

As Hannah Arendt once wrote, labor, work, and action are the three fundamental human activities that constitute an active life.
Action embodies human agency — the refusal to become a “bare life.”
Although action cannot be replaced by performance, Wang uses performativity as a means of fictional narration, layering it with geography, spatial scale, historical residue, folk culture, symbolism, local identity, and the immediacy of bodily emotion.
Like the structure of his multi-act videos, these plural actions compress multiple times and realities into a dense, living fabric.

In Wang Yanxin’s work, the body is both vessel and content.
It carries history and is carried by history, stirred and reshaped within it.
All he can do is to keep acting — to sustain multiplicity through action.