For the past ten years, Cang Xin’s art has always been questioning something, namely, what exactly is his art? He has done a series of performance art works, which have involved inviting people to stamp on plaster masks of his face, licking a multitude of different objects and people, changing clothes with many people of different identities, lying down in various different environments, and also his most recent works in which he depicts himself transformed into a part of various different things. It is hard to see any of this as Western-style modern art in the true sense of the term.
Apart from the famous group performance by East Village artists titled ‘To Add One Meter to an Unknown Mountain’, Cang Xin’s many works are on the whole difficult to assign to the Western-style categories of performance art or conceptual art. The Chinese idea of performance art is somewhat different to that of the West, partly because the term generally used in China is xingwei yishu, which translates literally as ‘action art’ or ‘behaviour art’, and Cang Xin has redefined the meaning of action art in his own way. His way is a shamanic vision of art located somewhere between sorcery, performance art and interaction; or to put it another way, Cang Xin’s art and identity move between the revelations of the shaman, the expression of the artist and the social experiments of the paranormal scientist.
For Cang Xin, it seems that art is not purely art, but the actions of a modern-day shaman that borrow the name of art. This gives his performance work a multi-layered quality, and blurs the boundaries of art itself. As an important representative of 1990s performance art in China, Cang Xin’s performance art definitely has a strong experimental quality concerned with the relationship between body and soul.
You could say that Cang Xin’s performance art has walked a road unique to itself. The core of this road lies in searching for the conceptual foundation of performance art and the individual roots of physical experience in his native society. He draws on the roles of shaman and modern scientist, and the possibility of direct soul communication with others. He has gradually broken away from the modes of Western conceptual art, and searched more consciously in the inner depths of his soul for the ideological or philosophical origins of action. By constantly forcing his body past its perceived boundaries, he has repeatedly challenged, with his own experiences, existing concepts about art and the identity of the artist.
Zhu Qi