Lot 31: ZHENG LIANJIE

B. 1962
BINDING THE LOST SOULS: HUGE EXPLOSION, 1993

BINDING THE LOST SOULS: HUGE EXPLOSION, 1993

70 7/8 by 89 3/4 in. 180 by 227 cm

signed in English and Chinese, numbered 2/10 and dated 2006; titled in English and Chinese on the reverse

chromogenic print

EXHIBITED

Fukuoka Asian Art Museum, Documentation of Chinese Avant-Garde Art in the 90's, 2000
Pingyao, Second Annual International Photography Festival, China, 2002
New York, Asian American Arts Center, Reappearance of Exit IV: Performance Art of Zheng Lianjie, 2002
Guangzhou, Guangdong Museum of Art, The First Guangzhou Triennial, Reinterpretation: A Decade of Experimental Chinese Art (1990-2000), 2002, p. 149, illustrated in color
Beijing, Millennium Art Museum; Buffalo, Albright-Knox Art Gallery, University at Buffalo Anderson Gallery and Center for the Arts, The Wall: Reshaping Contemporary Chinese Art, 2005-2006, p. 303, illustrated

NOTE

In the fall of 1993, Zheng Lianjie conducted a series of performance and installation works at the Simatai site of the Great Wall. Constructed during the 16th century and located in present-day Hebei Province, Simatai is known for its varied architectural styles and dangerous slopes. For seventeen days, Zheng and more than fifty collaborators completed four performance/installation pieces: Huge Explosion, Memory Loss, Black Cola, and Cavern-Strategy.

With help from the local villagers, Zheng and his crew spent five days gathering more than 10,000 of these Ming bricks from the foot of the Wall, and then wrapped the bricks in a cross-shape with red cloth, and scattered them along the slopes of the Wall for several hundred meters. As Zheng said, "The brick is a piece of frozen history. What we are doing is to bind and compress the lost souls at the sunset." At the end of the performance, Zheng and his collaborators threw paper money over the bricks, an act of releasing a dying soul in a traditional funeral.
(Excerpted from Gao Minglu, "Rediscovering the Lost Soul: Zheng Lianjie's Preformance Art")