DAY 138

PHOTOGRAPHIC CURIOSITIES

Performance Art Meets Photography

CUTTING-EDGE CONCEPTUAL PHOTOGRAPHY

It’s a typical day in Beijing. Pedestrians go about their daily business, strolling along a city sidewalk...until they come across the figure of a man who appears to have crash-landed head first into the pavement. His body is ramrod straight and motionless. Onlookers seem mildly perplexed. This is an example of the self-styled performance art that Li Wei photographs.

Wei states that he was a performance artist before he was a photographer, and this experience continues to influence his photography. Even in pieces depicting only the artist or elaborately orchestrated gravity-defying scenes, the viewer has a feeling that they are stumbling into the middle of a performance piece.

There is a tongue-in-cheek humility to Wei’s appearance in many of his works. While covered with paint and extravagantly groomed to depict the “Green Man,” he presents a matter-of-fact, deadpan stoicism. In other scenes, he appears overwhelmed, as when a companion is throwing the artist like a javelin from a moving vehicle.

The series “Dream-Like Love” serves as a poignant commentary on romantic relationships. Through the use of mirrors, custom backdrops, and other “low-tech” special effects, the artist creates a series of images in which a woman caustically carries his head around like an accessory, even standing on it.

While many in the West have lauded Wei as a “political demonstrator,” he has consistently described his work as an expression of universal human themes, rather than issues specific to 21st-century China. —DJS