Approaches to Xianchang: Documenting the Real in Post-socialist China

This chapter argues that performance artworks in China involving the participation of migrant workers over the turn of the century simultaneously demonstrate a desire to fully merge with society through sustained engagement with migrant worker communities, and to create a critical distance between art and society. Two such different notions of the relationship between art and society are demonstrated through two conflicting uses of the concept of site-specificity, or “xianchang” in Chinese, in the 1990s. The paradoxes involved in the use and application of xianchang were a direct reflection of China’s post-socialist condition, which include both the continued embrace of the ideals of socialism and a critical questioning of the repercussions of China’s socialist legacy.