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Cultural Capital
Black Moon Rising: Discipline, Punishment and Loads of
Laughs
By Maya Kóvskaya
When he adopted the name "Black Moon" (Hei
Yue), back in the heyday of the Yuanmingyuan artist colony,
Ji Shengli could hardly have known the intimate connections
in English between the verb "to moon" and the
performance art that would bring him fame. Yuanmingyuan
was one of China’s most fertile art communities and it
flourished from the late 80s until being disbanded in
1995. "Hei Yue" Ji Shengli originally made his
name in the avant-garde art scene as a painter, but after
he moved to Japan in 2001 he began to work with the medium
that would take his work to a new level: his buttocks.
"123 Buttocks" is the title of Hei Yue’s ongoing
performance art series, acclaimed in the US and China,
as well as Japan.
Incorporating elements of humor with figures of authority
and questions of propriety, Hei Yue’s performances employ
a cheeky method to pose a serious question: "who
has the right to discipline and punish?" Wearing
pants specially designed to reveal his butt, Hei Yue appears
before various symbols of power, authority and tradition,
and spanks himself repeatedly: policemen, Buddhist monks,
Japanese fishermen in traditional (and more notably, butt-revealing)
garb, a stern elderly Japanese man and more.
"I first got the idea from the split pants we Chinese
kids all wear, with the butt hanging out, when we are
little," he explains. "Also, parents spank kids
on the butt to discipline them. But now that I’m an adult,
the only one who has the right to spank me is myself."
Hei Yue’s use of props also manifests and extends his
central preoccupations. In Japan, from 2001-2003, he performed
"123 Buttocks" on street corners, in ornate
gardens and other public places, carrying a miniature
toy bird cage in hand, a child’s toy that reminded him
of the combination of cuteness and repression that he
came to associate with aspects of Japanese culture. In
2004 Hei Yue went to New York for a change of scene. In
Central Park, Times Square, Chelsea, near Boston and elsewhere,
he continued to document his "self-discipline"
on film, carrying a plush, pink stuffed monkey wearing
an I HEART NY t-shirt. Back in Beijing in early 2005,
he began to experiment with a range of props, such as
Qiuqiu, a squirrel-sized Pomeranian on a leash, who barked
and lunged, fearless as a lion only to be crushed by a
careless passing car hours late (not part of the performance!).
Most recently, while spanking away at his reddening buttocks
before a phalanx of cops who looked mighty squeamish,
he suggestively brandished a vibrating French tickler
*** mounted on a long, menacing staff. It was as if he
was saying: "I wield the phallus, that ultimate symbol
of power and domination, mounted like a weapon that I
can use to punish or pleasure, depending on your persuasion."
And in his hometown in Qinghai, vermilion-robed Buddhist
monks and against the serene backdrop of a Tibetan lamasery,
Hei Yue decided that the only suitable prop to hold in
hand was nothing at all but air.
In 2006, Hei Yue made a break from his early abstract
paintings. Recently, he completed the first batch in a
series of oil paintings that meditate on the same subject
matter as his performance art—his buttocks—but in ways
that bring fresh questions to light. "I felt that
since I had already used photography extensively to document
'123 Buttocks," a strictly realistic style of painting
would be visually redundant, and conceptually limiting,"
Hei Yue explains.
Using cute, stylized images of himself in with a gigantic
pink butt, swelling rosily from his split pants, dramatically
out of proportion with the rest of his child-like body,
Hei Yue paints scenes that extend the thread of his performance
and add a new dimension to his exploration. No longer
is "discipline and punishment" the main subject
of "123 Buttocks," but rather a tenacious state
of child-like innocence in the face of a complicated,
compromising society.
With the exaggerated pink butt as the focal point of
each painting, the viewer is stimulated to consider the
butt itself as an object of meditation. In none of the
paintings are we able to see the figure front-on, suggesting
that the rear end is the inverse of the face. Moreover,
in Chinese society, it is only small children who can
expose their rear ends freely in public (wearing split
pants), while adults can usually only expose their faces
and hands. Indeed, in this "face-obsessed" culture,
even the face is not something to be simply, casually
seen. It is something to be "maintained," "saved,"
"unwanted" and even "lost" on occasion.
Social intercourse is accompanied by the donning of masks—masks
to protect one's face, bolster one's ego, manipulate interlocutors.
While the face is often romanticized as a "window"
into our inner selves, in practice, it becomes just as
much an external image used for instrumental social intercourse—a
wall keeping people out and obscuring the inner world
of its wearer.
The butt, in Hei Yue's paintings, offers a response to
this world of complicated interactions and masks upon
masks upon masks. Signifying a child-like state of tenacious
naïveté and a refusal to be sucked into the so-called
"adult" world of dirty games, the voluptuous
butt in these paintings guides us through a series of
serious, adult world scenes—a quintessential red wall,
a prominent and politically-charged, public place, a flourishing
metropolis—which the figure in the paintings maintains
a stance of purposive distance, while viewing the world
with an innocent curiosity.
This stylized representation of Hei Yue refuses to give
up his child-like simplicity before symbols of political
and economic power. In one painting, the child-like Hei
Yue holds his floating head (with face also turned away
from us) attached to a string like a balloon, while standing
on top of the Tiananmen entrance to the Forbidden City.
In another painting, the child-like Hei Yue stands on
the head of the adult Hei Yue. Both are facing a red wall,
behind which bloom fragrant plum blossoms. But while the
adult Hei Yue can only see the red wall before him, the
child-like Hei Yue can smell the flowers, and can see
over the wall. He gazes out onto a vast expanse of blue,
horizon-less sky. And in yet another, he balances peacefully
on a tightrope overlooking a sprawling metropolis, using
the familiar ***-mounted staff from his previous performances—this
time more a symbol of pure pleasure than instrument of
punishment—in hand to maintain his balance.
Maya Kóvskaya
Beijing, 22 April 2006
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