Chinese artist fights concrete with erotic art

NEW DELHI - Erotic art with a social message literally hit the Indian streets when leading Chinese performance artist Han Bing performed “Dreams of Lost Homes” - a live erotic act - in the heart of the capital.

The one-hour act by bare bodied Bing, clad in just a loin cloth, making meditative love to a building construction rubble on a bed of cotton was “strangely arousing and spiritual” to some bystanders at the New Friends Colony market where it was performed.

Most of the 500 or more people comprising shoppers, vendors, shopowners, urchins, auto-rickshaw drivers and regular art lovers who watched the performance reacted with surprise and awe.

“What’s happening here?” asked fruit vendor Sukhwinder Tiwary. When told, he replied, “I am strangely aroused, touched and spiritually moved.

“I understand the message against violent urbanisation, alienation, problems of migration and demolition in big cities that the artist is trying to convey. I too am a migrant to the city,” he told IANS.

The performance was part of Bing’s multi-media interactive art series, “Love in the Times of Big Construction”, which is the highlight of an exhibition, “A Cry From The Narrow Between” that opened at Gallery Espace in the capital late Friday evening.

The exhibition, a collaboration between leading Mumbai-based young contemporary artist Tejal Shah and Bing, draws from lesbian literature and alternative sexuality to comment on issues like urban alienation, concrete jungles, migration, urban and sexual violence, same sex love and trans-sexuality.

According to curator Maya Kovskaya, the exhibition takes its title from an ancient Greek poem by Greek lesbian poet Sappho.

“For his act, Bing selected migrant construction labourers from the city. He listened to their life stories and tried to forge kinship with them through the live act. Bing comes from a village and he understands the alienating experience of living in a big city,” said Kovskaya, who shuttles between India and Beijing.

“The act, like his performance photographs, is a message against demolition of old buildings, rapid urbanisation, loss of green cover and an attempt to heal the world with love or eros,” Kovskaya, who works with Bing as curator and translator, told IANS.

Bing’s exhibits at the show includes a series of “performance photographs of his own self” titled “Love in the Age of Big Construction”.

It includes images of the tall and good-looking artist with flowing hip-length hair “sleeping with bricks”, “mating with construction machines” and “posing in the nude with building construction material” - signifying the death of human soul in the midst of the construction boom.

Born in 1974 in Jiangsu in rural China, Bing studied art at Xuzhou and the China Central Academy of Fine art.

Shah, known for her work on gender and alternative sexuality, hit it on the face with a untitled multi-media triptych of a woman being raped by a policeman and later by a group of revellers on a lonely road.

“I developed the narrative from a human rights report put together by the People’s Union for Civil Liberties in Karnataka,” Shah, who is showing her works on sexual violence and alternative sexuality for the first time in the capital, told IANS.

She has portrayed graphic visuals of sexual violence and played recorded confessions of transgenders and portrayed their lives in elaborate sound and video installations.

One installation, “Who Are You”, with a mirror and recorded confession of transsexuals in Mumbai stood out for its blatant statement - “I am often seen by people as a what’s that, to which I usually respond, ‘isn’t beautiful enough?”

“I wanted people to think about themselves, their own appearance and then pause before asking such questions as - ‘are you a boy or a girl’” Shah explained.

Her collection of 15 erotic stills from her 2006 series, “Hijra Fantasy”, lent Bollywood colour to the dreams of the transsexual communities of Mumbai.

Shah met Bing in 2008 in London. “I decided to juxtapose our works together so that it could form an interesting dialogue,” Shah said.

Shah is working on two video installation projects at the moment. “One is based on an Israeli soldier’s testimony of bull-dozing through Palestine and another on the concepts of alternative sexuality embedded in larger family concepts,” she said.

The show ends April 11.

(Madhushree Chatterjee can be contacted at madhu.c@ians.in)