Beijing East Village

The residents of the Beijing East Village comprised, most significantly, the first generation of Chinese performance artists, as well as the photographers who would document their works. They had come to Beijing from different provinces: ==Performances==

Two of Zhang Huan's most famous performances, 65 Kilograms and 12 Square Meters, were staged in the Beijing East Village, 65 Kilograms in his own combination living space and studio, 12 Square Meters in a public toilet not far from there. ==Photography vs. performance art==

As Gaby Wood writes, the Beijing East Village photographers' practice of documenting the performance artists resulted in "a curious aesthetic difficulty": When the photographers documented the performers, whose work was it? As recently as 1998, the New York exhibition of contemporary Chinese art, Inside Out, credited the photographic records of performance works by Ma Liuming and Zhang Huan to the performer, not the photographer. In Between Past and Future, the new show of Chinese photography and video at the V&A, some of the same images are listed as artworks by the photographer. 'I got very confused,' Xing Danwen says of this tussle. 'I had to go to an expensive copyright lawyer in New York. She said: "These are your photographs, they are your copyright." I still wondered if they were my own artwork - in a way it's not, but they are my photographs.' She resolved the issue by publishing a book entitled A Personal Diary of Chinese Avant-Garde Art in the 1990s. In a similar vein, Rong Rong's limited-edition hardback is called Rong Rong's East Village. ==References==