Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Ray Langenbach
1 Signs
In the next few paragraphs I will touch a few of the surfaces of the complex and extensive body of
work produced by Lee Wen over the past few decades. Like that of many other performance artists,
Lee Wen’s work is based in what might be called a performance iconics, relying on the strategic
deployment of visual and kinesthetic symbols and signs. His use of this emphatically semiotic
convention positions Lee Wen’s works in a larger trend of recent Asian performance art, which I
speculate derives from a braid of four cultural conditions, one contemporary and three rooted in
tradition. Singapore performance art has been profoundly influenced by China’s glyphic writing,
Peking Opera, and visual art tradition, by the Southeast Asian diaspora of India’s gestural language
of dance and theatre throughout SE Asia, and by Japanese Butoh. Superimposed on these earlier
sedimentations, is the need of cosmopolitan performance artists to find a way to communicate
across linguistic boundaries.
These image + gesture based performances also carry certain encoded attributes derived from both
Western and Asian performance traditions: the human body as signifier and signified, and as both
economic sign and political agency. The Western tradition of gestural performances reaches back to
the theatrical motifs of 18th century Realism, and 19th century Symbolism and Romanticism and, of
course, the 20th century modernist avantgardes. In South East Asia, performance art also recalls
and restores elements from local folk and popular performance conventions, such as Kebyar,
Wayang Kulit, Bangsawan, et al. Acknowledging the collision of these polarities–local/global,
modernist/traditional, formal/contingent, and surface/depth– is fundamental to an appreciation of
Lee Wen’s works.
Lee Wen uses many visual and sculptural signifiers, including animal hearts, live birds, dead
chickens, eggs, tools, pingpong, chains, guitar, boxes, buckets, and, with great regularity, yellow
paint. The deployment of semiosis as performance strategy has been readily accepted by
international audiences, while more articulated verbal performances are often lost in translation. By
deploying signs and symbols rather than longer, coherent verbal dialogues or monologues,
performance artists working internationally avoid the problems of finding adequate simultaneous
translation, and the inevitable mistranslations or misinterpretations that go handinglove with
translation. And they avoid seeing irritated local audiences who cannot access their meanings
walking out for a smoke in the middle of the performance. But on the downside, this has resulted in
the phenomenon of the muted performance artist who syphons all discourse through a quite limited
lexicon of gestures and props, and is thusly buffered from having to engage in a complex and
reasoned analysis of historical, political, social or philosophical phenomena. This sort of research
based intellectual labor is often displaced by simplistic kneejerk politics and unresearched ersatz
histories.
Yet some artists, such as Lee Wen, have engaged a complex array of haptic icons and gestures,
and have not shied away from the use of language in performance. When language is used, it too is
usually presented iconically: repeated short sentences and slogans, usually running in parallel to
analogous actions. Consider, for example, his series of performances/installations1 entitled Ghost
Stories from 1995 1997 in which he repeatedly used and visualised a phrase, commonly used in
Singapore "kill the chicken to frighten the monkey" (杀鸡 吓猴 sha ji xia hou) as a reference to a
strategy for government control. Lee Wen used the phrase as a signifier of repression in Singapore
and other countries, such as Korea. In his words, it connotes:
[…] a typical way of social control. I used this as a visual metaphor for the
extreme punishment of political detention without trial [….] social ostracism
and […] extreme repression of freedom.
I sometimes repeated the words in english (in mexico i used the spanish
translation) during the performance like an incantation of an unhappy
ghost. or sometimes it is suggested in objects i use. eg in the installation in
Kwang Ju [Guangju] there were 16 bald chickens floating in formaldehyde
in fruit preservation jars surrounding a long table with military blankets as
table cloth and sounds of monkeys screams from under the table. or i chop
up a chicken during the performance (in poland and mexico) while
repeating the saying (Lee Wen, email correspondence 3/3/03, sic.).
“Kill the chicken to frighten the monkey” works on the ambiguity between a symbolic execution and
1
Ghost Stories was presented at the
• 2nd Nippon International Performance Art Festival, Tokyo and Nagano Feb1995
• 4th Asian Art Show, Tokyo, April 1995
• 3rd Castle of Imagination, Bytow, Poland, June 1995
• 1st Gwangju Biennale Gwangju, South Korea, 1995 (installation)
• Hand-Made Tales, The Black Box, Theatre Works, Singapore, 1996 (installation & performance)
• Simposio International De Escultura Mexico-Japon, Tuxtla Guttierez, Chiapas, Mexico 1997 (installation
and
performance)
• Sexta Bienal de La Habana, Havana, Cuba 1997 (installation) (Lee Wen, email correspondence 3/3/03)
real political threat. The monkey (citizenry) is warned that it too will come under the knife unless the
warning is taken to heart and subsequent behaviours are altered. Causality is ‘read’ backwards as
the forewarned and frightened public avoids the chicken’s fate by altering their behaviour before any
successive prosecutions are ‘necessary’. The result of the cautionary spectacle is selfcensorship
a situation in which the antidote to what the government perceives to be social poison, becomes
the poison. In Lee Wen’s performances this complex political ritual is lifted out of historical context
and deftly distilled into a series of verbalgestural tropes.
2 Surfaces
In 1935, during the establishment of Nationalist Socialism in Germany, the German philosopher,
Hans Freyer, wrote of how the German people had come to “experience the power, the magnitude,
and the infinite depth of the political....” (Sluga 1993:88)
The ‘depth of the political’ Freyer was referring to was the desire in postdepression Germany for
wedding of politics with action, ideology and philosophy: a moment when thought and action, the
spiritual and the physical would all come together with a sense of national identity to produce a new
Germany. Tragically, the goal was as fascistic and as it was idealistic– an idealism founded on acts
of discrimination and ethnic cleansing.
By contrast, rather than Freyer’s idealistic modernist evocation of depth and naturalised ideologies
of blood and earth, Lee Wen focuses on the postmodern surfaces of identity, the skin and the
nation as cultural construction – as mask. This representation is no less idealistic perhaps, and
often tinged with the romantic... but is always laced with irony.
In a recent image from the performance, More China Than You #4 (2008), we see Lee Wen
masking his body’s surfaces with banal objects and slogans of daily life, ideology and nation. But
Lee’s most ubiquitous and resonant mask is the skin itself.
In the Journey of a yellow man series, Lee Wen painted his body with yellow paint, exacerbating his
genetic stereotype.2 Of Han Chinese descent, Lee is of course no more yellow than black people
are really black or whites really white. These are linguistic tropes used to mark and discriminate
culturally constructed ‘races’ or ethnicities. They are ‘anthropometries’, that is, methods for
measuring genetic differences. When performing, the painted body has the curious effect of altering
the entire colourscape around it. For example in this image of the Yellowman, all the surfaces
2
In his catalogue essay for the Third AsiaPacific Triennale (1999) writer, Lee Weng Choy described Lee Wen’s
Yellowman trope: “While Lee Wen's iconic imagery may seem rather obvious, what he articulates is a complex and
multilayered negotiation of selfrepresentation. As a Chinese, the allover yellow paint exaggerates his own ethnicity, but
rather than suggesting a straightforward embrace of Chineseness, his 'performance' of identity is ambiguous and playful.
(Lee W.C. 1999)
become enhanced: the pinkness of the skins of these two “white” witnesses, the mottled bluegreen
of the wall behind them, the sienna woodtrim, the grey of the sidewalk, the man’s doublebreasted
grey suit; the woman’s redpatterned top and black dress; his black hair; her grey hair. They stand at
a discreet distance from the small hyperethnicised Chinese man, wearing only briefs. In this photo
he ironically seems to have become the sign of the racial other as homunculus, suddenly
exteriorized and fetishized. But a precarious new balance of subjectivity is struck, and the question
arises whether he is their ethnic imaginary, or are they his (or both). It is as if, by limiting his
naturally mottled skin colour to a single wavelength, Lee Wen becomes known to us. Uncanny and
strangely recognisable, as if we had seen him before. No longer a body but an embodied trope,
Lee’s body is transmuted into sign, returned to haunt us.
But isn’t this the very definition of the cliché? A sign that keeps reappearing, the all too easy
metaphor that incessantly returns to haunt the collective mind? The Blue Man Group provides this
sort of all too recognisable image, but in their implied physical perfection providing a postfascist
bourgeois ideal. Merely because of Klein’s use of blue, the Blue Man Group has also shown interest
in the latter’s Anthropometry. So predictable…and cute. No real concept; just
Blueishness. (As the Beatles put it, “Are you Blueish?”)
The import of the Yellowman cuts deeper with its postcolonial hyperradicalization (see, for
example the untitled collaborative performance with Helge Meyer and Marco Teubner at the 2nd
Open Art Festival, Chengdu, Sichuan. The Yellowman was mutely and passively hanging from a
pole like a halfdead or resigned slave, held over the shoulders by the two Germans, who walked
around the town seeking to sell him back to the Chinese public.). Yet, perhaps because of its
homogeneity the Yellowness also becomes a safe symbolic surface – a kind of utopianism of the
skin + gaze. But there is something just under the unified and simplified Yellow surface that defies it:
a painful rupture in homogeneity that recalls a former era of violent biometrics: the artist’s spine.
3. Spine
Lee Wen’s spine: the aftermath of a late adolescent –early adult scoliosis is part of every Lee Wen
performance. I want to ask, “How do we read Lee Wen’s spine in performance?” But it’s intimate
relationship to the body of the viewer –in this case my body– refuses the use of the plural. I also
suffered from an adolescent Scoliosis, but mine was caught early and improved with a brace and
exercises. Lee’s spine was left to its own devices and curved in such a way as to produce a new
radical symmetry, with the upper section of the spine curving right and the bottom balancing it to the
left. While I experienced the rigid autocracy of the brace day and night, producing an indelible
memory of a deep pain in the vertebra that would never entirely leave me, according to Lee
Wen, his disease was not linked so much to pain as to an altered relationship to gravity and self
awareness. For both of us and millions of others with this disease, Scoliosis is linked with a
mythology of monstrosity and hybridity, terrors of stigmatisation, social exclusion, difference,
morbidity– the innocent but pitiable scapegoat figures of the Hunchback of Notre Dame and
Frankenstein, but also the conniving and morally predator, Richard III, and the figure of an unnatural
and unequivocal evil, Nosferatu. And it is linked to an abnormal medical mathematics of the body:
measurements of the deformation from the norm, radical statistics and radical physics.
The locus of Lee Wen’s spine in performance is not in his body but in the bodies and hermeneutics
of the audience. So, to repeat my question above “How do we (each of us individually, including
Lee) read Lee Wen’s spine in performance?” Thirty years after Susan Sontag’s Illness as Metaphor
(1978) it is far too simplistic and problematic to think of Lee Wen’s spine as a metaphor. In
contradistinction from a metaphorical interpretation, I speculate that the metrics imposed upon his
body is more appropriately read through a historical biometric tradition that was deployed by Britain
to measure and categorise its colonial subjects.
In an 1868 article, J.H. Lamprey, Librarian of the Royal Geographical Society, in the Journal of the
Royal Anthropological Society, entitled ‘On a method of measuring the human form, for the use of
students in ethnography’, laid out his method for photographing colonial subjects, criminals and
others of ethnographic interest, such as the working class. Lamprey’s and Thomas Henry Huxley’s3
‘Anthropometric Projections’ spurred the London Colonial Office in 1869 to request of all Colonial
Governors that ‘photographs might be collected in the Colonies having much ethnographic value,
and illustrating the peculiarities of the various races within the British possession’ (Cooper 1990:
60).
Lee Wen’s Anthropometry Revision: Yellow period (after Yves Klein), now has produced an ironic
hyperethnic restaging of Yves Klein’s reference to a virulently racist system for the ethnographic
imprinting of the bodies of colonial subjects. When Klein did his work in 1960, France was losing its
last colonies. They were defeated by the Vietcong at Dien Bien Phu in 1954, and the Algerian War
of Independence was beginning its final phase, leading to Algerian independence in 1962. Klein’s
reference to colonial biometrics belies French colonialism, but also resonates with Singapore’s own
colonial experience as part of British Malaya, where anthropometric photography was pioneered.
The history and politics in this performance is played out at the surface of the body.
SOURCES
Blue Man Group Website http://www.blueman.com/about/influence (10.07.08)
3
Huxley, a strong supporter of Darwin’s theories, was Lecturer in Natural History (1854), at the Royal School of Mines and
the Royal College of Science (later unified as the Imperial College of Science and Technology).
Cooper, Emmanuel (1990) Fully Exposed: The Male Nude in Photography, London and New York:
Routledge.
Lee Weng Choy, 1999, catalogue essay, The Third Asia Pacific Triennial, Queensland Art Gallery,
Brisbane: Australia.
Sluga, Hans, 1993, Heidegger’s Crisis: Philosophy and Politics in Nazi Germany, Cambridge,
Massachusetts, Harvard University Press
Wikkipeadia scoliosis http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scoliosis, (10.0708)
Dr. Ray Langenbach's research focuses on the performance and politics of information dissemination,
propaganda, and performance. He currently serves as Adjunct Professor, Finnish Academy of Fine Arts,
CoHead of the Department of Performance + Media, Sunway University, Kuala Lumpur, and Adjunct Senior
Fellow, School of Contemporary Arts, University of Western Sydney. He regularly writes criticism and
performance theory, performs, and convenes unsustainable international gatherings.