肉身，在黑暗中炼金 The Body, Alchemizing in the Darkness

Wang Yanxin is seen by many as a stubborn, wolf-like character, a personality that can be attributed to both his rugged appearance and his upbringing in the northwest of China, as well as the strong personal will that pervades his performance art. However, as one’s contact with Wang Yanxin deepens, it becomes apparent that he is also a sensitive, warm-hearted individual, and that behind the tension of personal heroism in his work lies a profound sadness and melancholy. In particular, during his recent residencies in Macau and Yunnan, this quality has become even more pronounced. As one of the emerging active artists in the field of performance art, Wang Yanxin has maintained a vigorous creative output. This exhibition delves into Wang Yanxin’s artistic language, method exploration, and practice through the three dimensions of the body, darkness, and alchemy.

The Body

For Wang Yanxin, the body is not merely a medium; it is the form of expression, the space, the path, or even the battlefield of his performance art. In various spaces and environments, Wang Yanxin constructs dialogues between the body and ideologies such as history, culture, memory, and politics. In other words, he uses the body as a narrative tool to bridge the absence of history in the present. From this perspective, Wang Yanxin’s use of the body aligns with Gilles Deleuze’s definition of the body—any two imbalanced forces, once they form a relationship, constitute a body. The “relationship of two imbalanced forces” runs through Wang Yanxin’s works. For example, in his early works Hero, Magician, and Kung Fu Master, the tension in his performances was built around the struggle against the will of others, in a direct confrontation with the audience and their expectations.

If in his early works, Wang Yanxin used the external imbalance of forces to achieve objectivity in the body, starting from 2016, his performances began shifting inward to explore the autonomy of the body itself. The body is no longer a flat surface devoid of layers but a unity of action, bodily consciousness, and narrative. In A Hundred Years, Wang Yanxin set off a hundred fireworks inside an abandoned railway tunnel. He stood motionless before the bright fireworks, allowing the burning gunpowder to scatter and injure his body in the narrow space. The Yunnan-Vietnam Railway, as the first railway in Yunnan province, bears the history of colonialism, the interplay between colonizers and the colonized, and the economic and cultural exchanges between different ethnic groups. In the dark, long tunnel, his body appeared intermittently amid the blooming fireworks, placing the smallness of the body alongside the weight of history in the same space-time. It was as if a tragic and romantic ritual unfolded.

Wang Yanxin expressed concern during a discussion of the exhibition theme that the concept of the body is too old-fashioned, and indeed, the body as an experience is a somewhat overused discourse. However, in today’s fragmented age of the internet and new media, where virtual landscapes and the flow of information dominate, re-shaping bodily experience has become a new necessity. The body must once again be re-examined as a medium, a space, and a battlefield—addressing the uncertain relationships between the individual, history, politics, and others.

Darkness

“Life, apart from death, is all just scratches.” This is a phrase Wang Yanxin came across in a Japanese temple, one that he often repeats. It connects to the earlier concept of the body experience, but it also reminds me of Russian writer Nabokov’s view of life, which he described as “a brief slit of light, between two eternities of darkness.” Whether it’s scratches or darkness, both signal the inescapable melancholic air of life, a quality that has increasingly become a distinct feature in Wang Yanxin’s recent works.

Wang Yanxin seems particularly sensitive and reflective in the darkness. He has created numerous performance works in dark environments. Darkness plays different roles in these works, sometimes merely as a concept of time, and sometimes as a key medium or material. For example, in his early performance The Night Remembers the Dawn, he stood on a frozen river at dusk, spraying red pigment onto a round glass pane with his mouth. The vivid red contrasted sharply with the darkness, and the futile yet tragic action reverberated between idealism and reality. Another piece, When We Meet Again in Fukushima, Japan, featured him dancing in the darkness like an elusive spirit, constructing a fleeting eternity between life and death, reality and illusion.

In The Gap in Darkness, Wang Yanxin stood alone by the side of a country road at midnight, waiting for dawn. With the occasional headlights of passing cars illuminating him, he resembled a ghostly statue—appearing and disappearing—most of the time blending into the darkness, merging with the sounds of insects and frogs. If he had waited for nightfall in the evening, would the piece have held the same tension? I believe the artist’s intention in this piece was not to emphasize the body but to hide it, or at least not to highlight its meaning. The clarity of daylight may have been too obvious, but it is only in the gaps of darkness that one can reflect on the body’s stature. We cannot assume that the body illuminated by chance is the “higher” one. After all, it is the long wait in darkness that constitutes the true norm.

Alchemy

Alchemy often evokes a sense of mystery and the fantastical, and when combined with the body and darkness, it enhances the mystique. However, the alchemy referred to here is not the medieval tragic or foolish pursuit of the philosopher’s stone, nor is it connected to the Chinese obsession with immortality. Rather, it refers to the process of purification—removing impurities to obtain the purest gold. In a spiritual sense, this could be likened to the process of self-discovery; in the language of performance art, it refers to the refining process of performance language.

We cannot apply an evolutionary lens to distinguish between the lower and higher value of Wang Yanxin’s early works versus his current pieces. However, I once had several discussions with him on this topic, as I mentioned at the beginning of this article. In the past, his works showcased a more aggressive expansion of bodily will, exhibiting vitality and tension. During his residency in Macau, he shared his work with me online, and we discussed it for three hours. I noticed that his works now bear a completely different temperament. He seems to have truly opened himself up, and perhaps even let go of himself, turning toward a warmer, more inward, and deeper form of expression. In fact, I felt that these newer works held even greater tension than his earlier ones.

Currently, Wang Yanxin’s work during his residency in Yunnan has refined and deepened this method and temperament, while also revealing the tragic air behind his personal heroism. He no longer emphasizes a particular meaning but rather dissolves the content and meaning that others might assign to his body and actions. This is also one of the questions he and I have frequently discussed: how, beyond the natural, geographical, and cultural differences in various residency projects, can one truly construct and push forward a methodological system for individual performance language? This exhibition is not a retrospective or a summary of Wang Yanxin’s ten years of performance art, but rather an exploration of a point from which to approach his works. More importantly, it is an anticipation of his performance entering a new starting point and breakthrough.

April 4, 2022 / Cui Fuli，Midnight