Not in the Mood for Halloween

When we arrived at Accent Sisters, a Chinese-language bookstore and art space nestled on the 7th floor of an office building near Union Square, on that crisp Halloween evening, the room, packed, was already dimmed. A film was playing. 

The film, shot in the mid-’90s on a handheld DV camera, documented the process of making arguably one of the best-known performance artworks in contemporary China: To Add One Meter to an Anonymous Mountain. In it, ten Chinese artists, eight men and two women, lined up in single file on top of a bare mountain on a visibly windy day in spring 1995, remove their clothes and weigh themselves on a scale. Someone outside the frame calls out their names and announces their weight one after another, without apparent emotion. Following the roll call, four of the heaviest men lay down on their stomachs, side by side. Then three more artists stack themselves on top of them. Two women climb up to create a third level. Finally, a lanky young man, so thin and frail that he looks borderline malnourished, makes his way to the very top, placing himself between the two women, his hands clasped on their shoulders for balance, making himself the pinnacle of the human pyramid. "That's a meter," a fully dressed fellow with a tape measure says. A group of photographers swoops in to document the ten-body mound. The raw footage is painstakingly slow and bland, eliciting a few yawns from the audience. 

Without pause, the second film began. This one, shot in 1996, titled Military Uniform, documents another Chinese artist, Zheng Lianjie, roaming Manhattan in search of a military uniform (the purpose of which is never clearly defined). Then the third, a work by one of the artists featured in To Add One Meter, Cang Xin. In it, he, wearing a loincloth, performs a shamanistic ritual involving an erected Star of David, a fire, and a pierced tongue. Finally, in the last film of the day, the camera follows a slightly older Mr. Cang to Singapore, where he visits a dozen religious venues (churches, temples, mosques, etc.), first appearing to be an ordinary traveler, then quickly laying face down on the floor, with arms spread wide open - a physical position he often takes throughout his art practice, bamboozling both other worshipers in the frame and viewers gathered in the present-day bookstore to an equal measure.

"Isn't that ... a vlog?" A young woman with Princess Mononoke-esque face paint whispered to her companion, a gothic girl in zombie makeup with a Gucci bag dangling from her arm. 

"An art vlog," said the gothic girl.

"What does it all mean?"

"No idea. But you know what, the photos from the first film sold for tens of thousands of dollars later on!" 

Eventually, the credits rolled, and the lights switched on. “We’re honored to have Mr. Cang Xin and Mr. Zheng Lianjie, two of the artists who pioneered the contemporary art movement in China and whose work we all just saw, join us this evening.” The host announced. “While Mr. Zheng is now caught up in the traffic, we have Mr. Cang video-calling in from China.”  Mr. Cang suddenly appeared on the wall. His face projected to a monumental size, staring down at the audience. He was in a white tank top. He had no hair, and his beard was grey and unruly. He greeted the audience. At 58, his voice was full of youthful energy. 

"When I first heard about performance art, I was so excited. I was in my early 20s, and everything looked so new and fresh to me." Mr. Cang said. In 1992, he moved to Beijing "to do art" following the footsteps of a fellow artist. He and several other artists took residence in a run-down area in east Beijing, along with migrant workers, beggars, scrap collectors, and stray animals. "It's called dazayuan,” a traditional Beijing residential courtyard housing compound built to house one big family for the rich, but later divided up to house multiple homes during decades of political movements, “and we lived there because the rent was cheap." Later, the collective grew larger, and the artist colony became better known as “Beijing East Village.” 

"Zhang Huan was one of the first to move there,” he paused for a split second as though hoping for the audience’s recognition of another superstar of Chinese contemporary art – there was none. He continued, “He and his classmates from the Central Academy of Fine Arts, Gao Yang, Zhang Yang, and Wang Shihua, in 1992." The name-dropping didn’t ring any bells with the young audience, likely because the majority of them weren't even born yet. "I did my first performance art project in ‘93, there in my room. And we talked and drank all day. It lasted until 1994, when the police and sanitation departments began the clear-out." The audience chuckled at the word "sanitation." 

"Some of us were caught and sentenced to ‘labour re-education.’” The chuckling stopped. “Ma Liuming for a month. Zhu Ming for three months. The authorities forcibly returned them to their home counties." He was referring to two other prominent figures of the Beijing East Village artists. "A few others and I narrowly escaped. But so began our vagrancy in the city." 

After two years of playing hide-and-seek with the authorities, the Beijing East Village artists reassembled in 1995 to perform To Add One Meter, which remains, to this day, the collective's most important work. As if an ominous prelude, several months later, the police caught up with all of them and broke apart the collective. 

"Eradicated," Mr. Cang said. "East Village was no more."

At this point, a gang of four entered the room from the rear door, turning a few heads. The leader of the pack, Zheng Lianjie, who was featured in one of the earlier films, Military Uniform, announced his arrival with an emphatic howl in Chinese, “HELLO, MY FRIENDS! HELLO HOSTS! TODAY IS HALLOWEEN — WE RAN INTO A LOT OF GHOSTS ON OUR WAY HERE! AND LOTS OF POLICE!” He made his way to the front of the room, then sat down, greeted the two hosts, and said hello to Mr. Cang, who was visibly baffled by the commotion (the camera on the laptop he connected to wasn't pointing at the room). 

"CANG XIN! HELLO TO YOU!" Mr. Zheng shouted at Mr. Cang's giant floating face projected on the wall as he removed his overcoat and handed it to one of his chaperones. "It must be hard for you to get up this early!"

At first look, Mr. Zheng is the polar opposite of Mr. Cang in terms of “vibes.” Under the slick black overcoat, Mr. Zheng had on a well-made wool vest. He had a showy, bright purple tie tucked neatly under his chin. He was verbose and pedantic. He tended to over-enunciate words in his slight Beijing accent, diluted by over 30 years in New York, and in an intonation that was unnecessarily stern and grave. (Out of nowhere, he began commemorating fellow artists who passed away in the past year, because the Halloween ghosts on the streets "reminded me of them.") Plus, he had a full head of remarkably long, flowy, dark hair and no beard. 

Like Mr. Cang, Mr. Zheng was considered by many to be one of the most important figures of the Chinese contemporary art scene. His most well-known work, Binding the Lost Souls, was a performance and installation project in which he gift-wrapped over 10,000 bricks with red ribbons and scattered them across more than 300 meters atop a remote section of the Great Wall outside Beijing in 1993. "Art critics hailed the piece as 'stunning and epic,' describing it as the single most important Chinese performance work since 1989," according to the info sheet for the Asian American Arts Center's exhibition "Reappearing Exit IV" from 2002. A single photo of this project was sold for $30,000 by Sotheby's in 2006.

"East Village and Yuan Ming Yuan are two different groups." Mr. Zheng spoke of another Chinese artist collective active in western Beijing in the early 1990s. He went on to give a 10-minute crash course on Chinese Contemporary Art History, noting milestone events, such as Robert Rauschenberg's visit to China in 1985, the 1986 Student Movement, the fall of the Berlin Wall, Tiananmen Square, etc. Yawns and chatter reemerged from the audience. A few phone screens lit up. 

"By October 1995, they dispersed the Yuan Ming Yuan artists on the grounds of public safety.” Mr. Zheng continued, deep in his own thought. “So the two collectives and the connection between them were lost. What I want to say is that when we look back, we shouldn't make it untruthfully grandiose. We must be true to reality, be true to art history.” 

Mr. Zheng went on in this mournful tone about how the authorities in Beijing demonized artists, and some more art history teaching, until the host interrupted him to give the floor to Mr. Cang, who had been idling on the screen for quite some time. The host asked him about the smear campaign in the early 1990s against artists. 

"They called us mangliu!”Mr. Cang said, which means “undocumented immigrants.” “We share this identity status with panhandlers!" The subdued audience burst out in laughter. "That was our reality," he continued. 

It was almost 10 P.M. when the talk ended. Much of the young art student-looking audience, dressed as various kinds of vampires, animals, and zombies, left quickly, hoping to catch a glimpse of the Halloween parade on Sixth Avenue. 

A few young artists and researchers stayed behind to network with Mr. Zheng and his chaperones, all men, including one gallery curator. They marveled at the predominantly female audience and took photos with everyone without asking for consent. 

A researcher handed over a business card to one of them. The man held the card upside-down, looked at it, and frowned. "What does it say? I've been living here for 12 years, but I still can't read English," he asked unapologetically. 

Later, Mr. Zheng and his buddies found themselves outside the building with three young girls from the audience. 

“Come with us for a drink!” One of Mr. Zheng's friends said to the ladies. 

“Thank you, but we already have plans.” Another girl said shyly. 

Before he could make another attempt, the girls shuffled away without saying goodbye.  

The four men looked at the droves of people in all kinds of outlandish costumes walking up Fifth Avenue, bewildered and forlorn. Mr. Zheng pulled up his collar and said, "Guess it'll just be us for a drink, then." He led the way, against the flow of the carnival crowd, into the NYC night that had just begun to get chilly.