Language: Bilingual
Size: 192 mm x 256 mm
Page number: 152
Print run: 500 copies
First edition: June 2019
Liang Xiu’s work offers up the body of the artist and the gaze of the artist at once: a burning fire at the fringes of a society which is at once the most powerful political economy in the world, and yet continues to encounter essential challenges around equality, sexuality and artistic identity, both in its present and recent past. Hers is a practice which encompasses the radical performative rhetoric of Ren Hang, who was directly inspired by the poet and theatrical innovators Shuji Terayama (one of Moriyama’s first collaborators), and the dark, alternative vision of youth found in the Japanese avant-garde of that same generation. But despite all appearances to the contrary, Liang Xiu, like Ren Hang himself in his own way, is emphatically and wholly a Chinese artist. Both are compelling and inspiring figures whose shared position in relation to the society that produced them is at once emblematic and marginal.