Beijing East Village

Beijing East Village was a short-lived, politically charged Chinese art collective that came to prominence in the early 1990s. Its name refers both to a poor migrant settlement on the eastern outskirts of Beijing where the artists lived and, ironically, to the bohemian art scene of New York's East Village. In squalid conditions the young artists concentrated on radical performance and photography of the body, exploring the limits of endurance, identity, and the relationship between the individual and a repressive society. Key figures were the performance artists Zhang Huan and Ma Liuming, along with the photographer Rong Rong, who documented their actions and preserved them for history. Works such as Twelve Square Metres and To Add One Metre to an Anonymous Mountain (1995, made by former residents after the community had been disbanded) became canonical examples of the Chinese avant-garde. Official pressure and arrests led to the community's dissolution by around 1994, yet the East Village remained a turning point in the emergence of contemporary Chinese performance art.