The Transmutations of Time: A Retrospective Exhibition on Yang Zhichao’s Performance Art

On December 19th at 6 pm, the opening will feature a short welcome speech by Strafella Giorgio, followed by a few words from the artist.

For over three decades now, Yang Zhichao has been researching an equilibrium across the three dimensions of Performance Art—the body, the site, and time. In Yang’s art, the site asks questions on who we are: Do I belong here? Am I sane? How do we get to understand one another in society? The body asks questions on control: Whose body is this? Do I have the freedom to break arbitrary boundaries between life and art? How do pain and violence that I do not control become a gateway to the most elusive and quotidian thoughts?

This exhibition focuses on the dimension of time in Yang Zhichao’s performance art, and particularly on the ways in which time turns into something else when a meditative connection between body and site is established. The body then becomes a vessel for the memory of what is meant to be forgotten—a tool to leave and receive traces of growth, alteration, loss, dislocation. Recording the occurrence of simple events also becomes a method for the sublimation and deposition of the substance of time. Hence, diaries, charts, and other methods of recording are important to Yang both as physical artifacts and as mnemonic tools to overcome the limits of the body and the site.

The works of performance art that Yang Zhichao has created in his long artistic career are numerous and varied, and this retrospective exhibition does not aim at presenting an exhaustive or even representative selection of them. Instead, by showing a very small and focussed set of his most meaningful works, it aims to introduce the viewer to Yang’s distinctively subdued and anti-spectacular approach to time-based art.

This work was supported by the OP JAC Project “MSCA Fellowships at Palacký University II.” CZ.02.01.01/00/22_010/0006945, run at Palacky University in Olomouc, Czech Republic.