Becoming One: Xiao Lu’s Dialogues of Ink and Water / By Luise Guest
On 5 September 2015, at the Valand Academy of Fine Arts in Gothenburg, Sweden, performance artist Xiao Lu (b.1962) poured buckets of black ink and water over her head in an almost trance-like ritual of self-immersion and re-emergence. Her apparently simple actions, viscerally shocking to view, embodied Xiao’s complex responses to gendered lived experiences and to her identity as a Chinese artist. The performance was entitled One, an intentional reference to the Daoist text, the Daodeijing:
The way begets one; one begets two; two begets three; three begets the myriad creatures.
The myriad creatures carry on their backs the yin and embrace in their arms the yang and are the blending of the generative forces of the two (Lao Tzu, p.49).
This was not the first time that Xiao Lu had used ink, or ink-like materials. Struggling with the impact of the menopause in 2011, she had begun to write calligraphy with the dregs of the Chinese medicines she was taking to alleviate her symptoms, copying out a classical Tang poem each day. This calming, meditative habit itself became a performance work entitled Changes. Since then, she has continued a calligraphy practice with ink and brush, a habit she describes as an expression of essential qi. She told me:
Over time, water and ink became a part of my life. Drawing some ideas that came out of my head, occasionally drawing some ink paintings and writing some calligraphy, formed a habit in my life. So doing performance with water and ink is just a transformation of a natural form of this daily accumulation1.
In ancient China painting, calligraphy and poetry were known as the “Three Perfections” (san jue).2 Each practice was interconnected, and equally important. At first, One appears to bear little relationship to these refined imperial traditions. But Chinese calligraphic expression has always been an embodied artform – the body projected in space and time. A tenth-century treatise on painting insisted that the flowing mark of the brush should be composed of four elements: muscles, flesh, bones, and breath.3 Ink, in many guises, has remained a constant material and symbolic presence in Chinese contemporary art. Ink was used in one of the first performance art events in China: in 1984 Wang Peng (b. 1961) covered his hands with ink and made handprints over his surroundings.4 Artists today incorporate ink painting (shuimo hua) and calligraphy (shu fa) into abstract painting, performance art, installation, digital media, video – even virtual reality.
The juxtaposition of Xiao Lu’s photographic documentation of One with Qing Dynasty calligrapher Qian Nanyuan’s A Preface Presented to Liu Taichong and Wang Xiao Min’s Tang Poem 1 and 2 (1999) reveals the continuing imbrication of past and present. Xiao’s violent self-immersion as black ink splashes over her hair and face recalls the “wild cursive” of Tang Dynasty Daoist artist/poets such as Zhang Xu (675–759), who were said to paint with their own hair when drunk.5
The story of Xiao Lu’s emergence into the post-Mao avant-garde art scene provides further illumination. She was catapulted to instant notoriety when she suddenly fired two shots from a handgun at her own installation at the opening of the important 1989 “China/Avant-garde” exhibition at the National Art Museum in Beijing.6 Xiao’s dramatic action resulted in the (at first temporary, then permanent) closure of the exhibition and the subsequent brief detention of the artist. Xiao Lu’s installation comprised two public telephone boxes, one containing the figure of a man and the other a woman. Between them, in front of a mirror, a red dial telephone sits on a white plinth, its receiver hanging off the hook. The work is titled, ironically, Dialogue. Xiao intended it to represent the impossibility of communication between young men and women like herself who had grown up in a revolutionary world in which romance, love and sexual expression were taboo and gender distinctions were erased. Women were expected to do the work of men, “holding up half the sky” – and, despite Mao Zedong’s policies of gender equality, to manage the household as well.7 The work was deeply personal, reflecting on Xiao’s experience of abuse by an older man. She felt voiceless in the face of this violation of trust.8
Xiao Lu Dialogue, 1989 photographic documentation of installation and performance on 5 February 1989 at China/Avant-garde 90 x 120 cm. Image courtesy the artist
Dialogue represented a masculine/feminine binary characterised by suspicion and mutual incomprehension. Twenty-five years later, One signifies this continuing tension in a poetic, allegorical form. Xiao represents the possibilities and failures of dialogue – its connections and disconnections – in the face of persistent binaries of masculine/feminine, freedom/repression and past/present. Not least, her performance may be read as the artist’s response to her experiences in a (still) patriarchal Chinese artworld.
Xiao Lu mixes black ink and water in glass vessels, then pours the mixture into a bucket. Abruptly, she raises the bucket above her head; she is instantly erased beneath a cascade of black liquid. Repeating the action, water washes away the ink and reveals her face.9 The diluted ink soaks into felt and xuan paper beneath her feet, leaving behind traces that resemble the deep blacks and soft clouds of ink wash in a traditional painting.10
Xiao Lu, One, 2015, performance at Live Action 10, Valand Academy of Fine Arts, Gothenburg. Image courtesy the artist.
Xiao Lu told me:
In One, my body is a writing brush, the place is covered with rice paper, and water and ink fall on the rice paper through my body. Their existence breaks the presentation of traditional ink and wash. Water and ink combine tradition and modernity through the medium of the body.11
Xiao inserts her female body into a male-dominated tradition – no less a radical gesture than the gunshots of 1989. In a text accompanying the video documentation Xiao references yin and yang as mutually reciprocal universal forces:
Ink is Yin
Water is Yang
Yin and Yang
Becoming One is the Way of the Universe.
In Daoist cosmology yin embodies the feminine (that which is turned away from the sun) while yang (that which is turned towards the sun) is its complementary, masculine opposite element. One is Xiao Lu’s intensely physical representation of the tension between these supposedly equal forces. We could interpret Xiao Lu’s use of ink to obliterate her face as an act of self-erasure beneath the weight of Confucian tradition. Yet her reclamation of the ink medium and her triumphant re-emergence suggests, rather, a post-menopausal fearlessness. One is a resistant, embodied interpretation of a woman’s lived experience. It represents a dialogue between China’s past, and the paradoxes of the present, expressed through the medium of ink. The ink and water splashed over Xiao Lu’s body represent the hope that, in spite of persistent patriarchal systems of power, dialogue between yin and yang, masculine and feminine, may yet be possible.
1 In an email to the author on September 22, 2022, Xiao Lu explained the importance of her calligraphy practice in a specially designed room in her Beijing home: “I walk into it, and the scent of ink blows on my face.”
2 The term “Three Perfections” or “san jue” (三絕) dates back to the eighth century, when the poet, painter and calligrapher Zheng Qian presented a work to the emperor, who was so impressed that he wrote “Zheng Qian san jue” on the scroll. For more, see Michael Sullivan, “The Three Perfections: Chinese Painting, Poetry and Calligraphy”, London: Thames and Hudson (1974)
3 Ching Hao (905 – 58) quoted by Mersmann, Brigit, “(Ideo-)Logical Alliances Between Image and Script: Calligraphic Reconfigurations in Contemporary Chinese Art” in Plesch, Veronique, Catriona MacLeod and Charlotte Schoell-Glass (Eds), Elective Affinities: Testing Word and Image Relationships. Leiden: Brill (2009).
4 Britta Erickson, “The Contemporary Artistic Deconstruction – and Reconstruction – of Ink and Brush Painting”, Yishu Journal, Vol 2 No. 2 (2003) p.82
5 For a discussion of performative traditions of calligraphy including Zhang Xu’s “drunken calligraphy” see Li-hua Ying, 2012. ‘Negotiating with the Past: The Art of Calligraphy in Post-Mao China’ ASIANetwork Exchange Volume 19 (2) Available from: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/277107374_Negotiating_with_the_Past_The_Art_of_Calligraphy_in_Post-Mao_China [accessed 29.1.22].
6 For more on the “China/Avant-garde” exhibition and Xiao Lu’s incendiary contribution, see Alex Burchmore’s account of the symposium held in conjunction with Xiao’s survey exhibition, “Xiao Lu: Impossible Dialogue” at 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art in 2019: https://4a.com.au/articles/china-avant-garde-exhibition-xiao-lu-alex-burchmore
7 Whether Mao Zedong ever actually said ‘Women hold up half the sky’ is open to question. He did say, ‘The times have changed; men and women are the same’, recorded in a conversation on 27 May 1965. ‘时代不同了，男女都一样/ Shidai butong le, nan nü dou yiyang’, became a famous political slogan, promulgated throughout China.
8 In her examination of the performative female body in Chinese contemporary art Shuqin Cui provides a thorough analysis and explanation of the work. Xiao Lu’s installation, one of a mere handful of works by women among the 300 or so selected by the curators, symbolised her experience of abuse (not revealed until many years later) at the hands of a trusted authority figure. She fired the gun “to explode her private nightmares in the public space of the national museum”. See Shuqin Cui, “Gendered Bodies: Towards a Women’s Visual Art in Contemporary China”, Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press (2015) p.114.
9 Video of the performance, images, and more information may be found on the artist’s website at https://en.xiaolu.com.au/index.php?c=show&id=18
11 In an email to the author on 22 September 2022.