Yang Zhichao (traditional Chinese: 楊志超, simplified Chinese: 杨志超, pinyin: Yáng Zhìchāo) Born in 1963 in Gansu province Northern Manchuria, is a performance artist living and working in Beijing.
After graduating from the Northern Manchuria Art University, Northwest Normal University in 1986, he started as a painter but moved into producing performance art. In 1998 Yang Zhichao moved to Beijing. He attempts to raise social issues through his performances and has achieved notoriety through extreme actions such as branding his ID number on his body, planting grass on his back, and surgically implanting objects in his leg and stomach. His work is concerned with the body, and how, in an age of science and technology, our bodies no longer belong to ourselves but to society and the state. He has exhibited both in China and abroad, including the famous "Fuck off" show at the Eastlink Gallery, Shanghai, the Guangdong Museum of Art Contemporary Art, Guangzhou, 2003, the Dadao Live Art Festival, Beijing, 2004 and a tour of eight major institutions in the UK organised by Beijing-based curator Shu Yang in 2006.
His show 'Chinese Bible' opened in their gallery Chancery Lane. For Chinese Bible, Yang Zhichao spent three years collecting from second - hand shops the personal diaries of overlapping generations. The 3000 notebooks inscribed with personal writings span 50 years from 1949 to 1999. The show also features 40 pencil drawings the artist made based on pages from the diaries.
Yang Zhichao talked about half a dozen of his most important works, mostly performance pieces, with the earliest dating back to 1989. Yang Zhichao is a multi-disciplinary artist whose best known for extreme performance pieces. These include a performance in the studio of his long term friend and collaborator Ai Weiwei, in which an iron bar was heated and put against his skin leaving a permanent burn scar of his ID number. Followed by a performance that saw a doctor medically insert (without anesthetic) bunches of grass into his soulder. The grass eventually wilted and the artist was left with a nasty shoulder infection.
Yang must be viewed as an artist reflecting on the globalized era through his body. The stark comparison from rural life to that of the globalized city keenly informs Yang's exploration of the contemporary body. On the most basic level Yang is concerned with the relationships fostered between our body and the world around us and uses his body as a site for a literal and extremely physical exploration of contemporary concerns. His works always involve a degree of violence against the body, which transmit an acute sense of pain to the viewer - even through photographs of the performances. It is through this visceral experience of pain that Yang examines the clash between the body and the modern advances that seek to contain and coerce it. The raised, red and raw sight of his flesh is an extreme example of how, in this globalized 'big brother' era, authorities have sought to develop and maintain tracking systems to monito our every move. Through branding himself, Yang evokes concepts of prisons and cattle, both of which are examples of being trapped within an overarching system.
Yang proposes through his performances that in the globalized age our bodies are more in tune with technology than nature. In his piece, ""Hide"" (2004) Yang, with the hielp of artist Ai Weiwei and a surgeon, explores this development. Sitting in Beijing's art district Caochangdi, Yang submits his body to science and has a small metal object implanted into his leg. Ai did not reveal what he had chosen to implant - hence the title of the piece. However, to this day, Yang has this foreign material in his leg and continues to function as normal.
This is in stark contrast to his other works ""Planting Grass"" of 2000 and ""Earth"" of 2004, where he had a surgical incision on his shoulder planted out with creek grass and then had a surgeon plant some earth into the roof of his stomach. Yang was in immense pain for each of the performances but, tellingly, while his body rejected the natural products of grass and dirt, his body continues to exist unchanged and unencumbered with the metal object in his leg. While his body enveloped and adapted to the metal piece. In the age of globalization such works suggest that our bodies are not only branded by the state but have also adapted to the point where they are more comfortable being cybernetically engineered than connected to the natural world.
Yang was shocked by the mega-city Peking on arriving there in 1998. A greater contrast to life in his home province Gansu on the Tibetan roof of the world can hardly be imagined. His performance 'Iron' expresses the clash of these worlds. To a person whose childhood experience is embedded in a mystical love of nature, a city like Peking, whose rate of modernization is extraordinary by international standards, can be deeply vexing or even threatening. By having the number of his passport burned into his back, Yang is presenting in visual form the confrontation of the public and the private, of industrial modernity and rural tradition.
The performance 'China Red' (2004) is full of associations, like the title itself. The hue red is to be seen everywhere in China. Yang's performance which is named after this hue - in which he slits one of his fingers, mixes the blood with red Chinese ink, then paints portraits of strangers with it - refers to the wholly elementary and physical symbolism of the hue red. Since ink and silk are traditional Chinese materials, outside China 'China Red' also becomes something of a dialogue between cultures.