YANG ZHICHAO
ChinaRenowned Chinese artist Yang Zhichao is China’s most extreme performance artist. Yang Zhichao graduated from the Art Department of Northwest Normal University in 1987. Chinese artist Yang Zhichao is one of China’s most extreme performance artists. He uses his body as a tool to draw on social issues linking the individual with the greater world. Many of his performances involve painful acts such as branding and surgical processes. Personal pain becomes part of his experience and a means of communication to engage the larger world.
In his recent work Yang Zhichao spent three years collecting from second-hand shops the personal diaries of overlapping generations from China. The 3,000 notebooks inscribed with personal writings span 50 years from 1949 to1999. The writings reach deep into the very essence of feelings among the Chinese whether emotional, political or even mundane during a half-century of monumentally changing times. The title, Chinese Bible, as he has named this work, links the idea of a Bible being a personal book of devotion that at the same time should be followed without questioning. He feels these diaries fall somewhere in between as they are the expressions of both individual ideas as well as collective thought. Yang Zhichao’s Chinese Bible is yet another chapter linking both China’s past in order to understand its future.
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