170544 UE Networked Bodies. Performance and its history/ies in East Asia (2024S)

This course expands perspectives on performance art beyond the Western-centric canon, focusing on developments in the East Asian region. It aims to develop a critical understanding of performance, its practices and ways of documenting it in the context of local and regional histories.

The last two decades have witnessed a period of heightened interest in performance. Initially an art form outside the canon (and market), performance has become a regular feature of all forms of art events such as art fairs, biennials, festivals, gallery and museum exhibitions. Artists are prominently invited and staged to take over gallery spaces and fill them with their 'liveliness', the coveted state for which performance is constantly praised. The complex and overlapping histories of performance art in East Asia are often overlooked when it comes to narrating the (contemporary) canon of performance art.

We will discuss performance works from the East Asian region in the context of their respective socio-political climates, such as the post-Cultural Revolution period in China, the long period of Martial Law in Taiwan and the atmosphere of post-war Japan. Through selected works, we will revisit the anti-institutional roots of performance and trace the developments that slowly but surely led to performance being invited and commissioned into the institutional sphere of museums and performing arts institutions.