Xiao Lu Dialogue with Whiskey Chou on Zoom
Conversation between Whiskey Chow and Xiao Lu, China’s foremost feminist performance artist, reflecting on inter-generational performance practice alongside sharing video documentation of their past work. Supported by the Centre for Contemporary East Asian Cultural Studies (CEACS), University of Nottingham. (Chinese with English translation).
The event will have live translation from Mandarin to English.
Xiao Lu (born 1962 in Hangzhou, China). In 1988 she graduated from the Oil Painting Department of the Zhejiang Academy of Fine Arts (now China Academy of Fine Arts) in Hangzhou. From 1989 to 1997 she has lived in Sydney, Australia and became an Australian citizen in 1997. From 1997 to 2020, she lived and worked in Beijing and Hangzhou. Currently she lives and works in Sydney. Xiao Lu is most known for her performance. In 1989, Xiao Lu fired two shots at her installation Dialogue at the “China/Avant-Garde” exhibition at the National Art Museum in Beijing, causing an immediate shutdown of the show. When the Tiananmen Square massacre occurred four months later, her actions were heavily politicized, referred to as “the first gunshots of Tiananmen”. Her practice witnesses various stages of her personal development, evolving from an individual female rebel to a woman artist with a feminist consciousness and social awareness. Arising from personal experiences and reflections on human emotions and social condition, her work investigates questions concerning the search and expression of true freedom. Selected recent exhibitions include: "Democracies" TATE Liverpool, UK (2020); “Collection Galleries: 1970s - Present”, MoMA, New York, USA (2019); "Skew", 10 Chancery Lane Gallery, Hong Kong (2019); "Xiao Lu: Impossible Dialogue”, 4A Centre Contemporary Asian Art, Sydney, Australia (2019); “Collection Displays: Performer and Participant”, TATE Modern, London, UK (2018); “Her Kind”, Zhuzhong Art Museum, Beijing, China (2018); “Art and China After 1989: Theater of the World”, Guggenheim Museum, New York, USA (2017). Xiao Lu's works are of the collection of major international public institutions, including TATE Modern, London; MoMA, New York, USA; the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia; the National Gallery of Victoria, Australia.
Whiskey Chou (b.1989) London-based performance artist and Chinese drag king. Whiskey’s art practice engages with broadly defined political issues, covering a range of related topics: from female and queer masculinity, problematizing the nation-state across geographic boundaries, to stereotypical projections of Chinese/Asian identity. Her work is interdisciplinary, combining embodied performance with moving image and experimental sound pieces. As an artist-curator, Whiskey launched, led-curated and performed in ‘Queering Now 酷兒鬧’ in2020 (Chinese Arts Now Festival). Queering Now is a curatorial programme amplifying marginalized voices of the queer Chinese/Asian diaspora. Whiskey has been involved in feminist and LGBTQ activism in China since 2011. She contributed to and performed in ‘For Vaginas’ Sake 將陰道獨白到底 (2013)’ (original Chinese version of The Vagina Monologues), and curated the first Chinese LGBTQ music festival, ‘Lover Comrades Concert 愛人同志音樂會 (2013)’, Guangzhou. Whiskey's recent works include: Do You Hear The People Dream?, Wysing Polyphonic Festival, Online; The Moon is Warmer than the Sun, Queering Now, Rich Mix, London (2020); Unhomeliness, Tate Modern, London; Whiskey the Conqueror, Tate Britain, London (2018); Purely Beautiful New Era (ft. Haocheng Wu), Victoria and Albert Museum, London; Great Conversation, Uppsala Konstmuseum, Uppsala (2017).