Last night was the opening of the new CEAC gallery space. There was an exhibition and I did a performance, well actually I did two performances. First I did a short performance with Jia Zhixing in which I spoke Chinese and he ‘translated’ it into English. Although this was a much simpler piece than what followed, it basically consisted of saying some lines of Google translated text back and forth, the fact that I had to perform it in Chinese in front of a Chinese public made it quite a challenge. As I suspected, a Chinese public can be quite forgiving if a foreigner tries to speak Chinese and I think I got some goodwill as a result of trying it at all. We stood side by side in the same position where 20 minutes earlier the opening speeches, also spoken in English and Chinese, had taken place. It was fortuitous that we could do this and thus link the performance to life. I thought that the sentences I spoke, almost all from memory, were quite absurd Chinese, the result of intelligible language passing through the Google translate scrambler. However, people said that it was not so bad and that they understood me very well. Maybe they were being polite, but I honestly cannot tell. This makes me wonder if the idea of doing the show in Chinglish – Zhonglish is necessary or whether it needs to be reframed slightly. I though Jia, who is not used to doing performances and was just as nervous about speaking in English in front of an audience as I was about speaking Chinese, did very well. By keeping it simple and not making too much a performance out of it we were able to stay focussed enough to make it to other side in one piece.
Round 2 was 2012 a quite different sort of performance. I was able to use the Chinese translation of the piece that I had made in 2009 and project this alongside my images. This helped bring people in, particularly those who were not fluent in English. The public was just about an ideal size for the space and they were very concentrated. I don’t think most of them were so familiar with the form of a performance lecture but they seemed to go with it and get some of the humour. It was a challenge working out how to deliver the performance to a very mixed public some of whom were native English speakers but most of them not, and some of them art professionals and others completely new to what I was doing. I was also aware that there was potential for misunderstandings and due to the nature of the piece, it being about conspiracy theories and having a serious Chinese focus to it, people might not get the ironies or deeper intent. It is after all quite an ambiguous performance and even doing it in the UK people are often not sure what to make of it. I thought that given all the potential pitfalls it went well, people were very concentrated and I later spoke to many who took it in a good way with the performance provoking thought and discussion.
Something that struck me about the opening was the fact that there were quite a number of press and media there who stayed for the performance. I had to compare this to the typical situation in the UK where such attention for the type of work I do is extremely rare. These were not specialist art press but rather regional papers and TV covering a rather ambiguous performance art lecture. It felt positive that such a thing was deemed newsworthy. In the UK I have the feeling it is usually considered by the media as something for the initiated only and therefore not of relevance to normal people.
Today I have to put all that excitement behind me and get back into my Chinese lessons as the performance took me away from them for a few days.
