(Men around us #1 here.)
Zhang Huan: To Raise the Water Level in a Fishpond, 1997, performance, Beijing
I invited about forty participants, recent migrants to the city who had come to work in Beijing from other parts of China. They were construction workers, fishermen and labourers, all from the bottom of society. They stood around in the pond and then I walked in it. At first, they stood in a line in the middle to separate the pond into two parts. Then they all walked freely, until the point of the performance arrived, which was to raise the water level. Then they stood still. In the Chinese tradition, fish is the symbol of sex while water is the source of life. This work expresses, in fact, one kind of understanding and explanation of water. That the water in the pond was raised one metre higher is an action of no avail.
In old communist China, there was little freedom but there was work guaranteed, along with a rough version of a safety net for the compliant. In post-communist China, freedom is given or taken away on the whim of the state. Thanks to capitalist inroads, there is no safety net. It’s a new world of totalitarian capitalism: all risk and few freedoms.
To Raise the Water Level in a Fishpond features the victims of the new economy. They are workers for whom there is no work. They raised not just the water level but the profile of all the left-over and displaced workers around the world.
As John Perreault wrote in another context, capitalism is global, but so is tuberculosis.
That photo, and another view of the same performance, goes on view at Western Bridge starting tomorrow, as part of our summer show Underwater.
Nice piece Regina.