Profile | Founder of China’s first performance art festival Chen Jin on growing up on the Tibetan plateau, and his sideline as a Sichuan food chef
- Chen Jin discovered performance art in the late 1990s in Beijing, where he was acquainted with the artists of the day, including Ai Weiwei and Zhang Dali
- He tells Thomas Bird about launching the annual Open International Performance Art Festival in 2000, which at its height attracted 352 artists from 50 countries
I was born in Baosheng Township, in the middle Sichuan province, in 1963, not long before the Cultural Revolution began. My mother, Zheng Dainong, worked in a nearby restaurant while my father was recruited as part of a campaign to develop the northwest and was sent to the arid province of Gansu.
Baosheng is now a part of Meishan city, which is famous throughout China as the birthplace of (the Northern Song dynasty statesman) Su Dongpo.
He went on to live all over China during his lifetime, painting, writing poems and drinking fine wine wherever he went.
In some strange way, my life’s journey has been a bit like his.
Hitting a plateau
My home corner of Sichuan was very lush and humid. As kids we spent our free time climbing in the forest-coated hills. School wasn’t very interesting, we mostly just read the newspaper and were made to repeat what we’d just read even though we didn’t really understand it.
My mother was eventually transferred to work alongside my father and, at the age of 15, I arrived to live with them in Gannan Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture (in southern Gansu), to finish my high-school studies. Gannan was at a high altitude and I remember the grassland was covered in lovely flowers and grazed by cattle.
It was a world apart from my home in Sichuan. There were different customs, a different language even, and, of course, a completely different gastronomic landscape, which my body instinctively rejected. Nowadays, having travelled a great deal, I’m much more open to different cultures and food.
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By the books
Culturally speaking, my education had been quite poor. But traditional Tibetan art exposed me to painting in a serious way. Gannan is blessed with beautiful scenery and began to attract artists once the era of reform and opening up began.
I don’t remember much economic change in the early 1980s. For me, reform meant one thing: books. After graduating high school I didn’t go straight to university but spent a few years digesting all the foreign translations of books arriving in the nearby Xinhua Bookstore branch.
This habit of voracious reading continued when I was accepted into the fine arts department of the Northwest Normal University, in the provincial capital, Lanzhou. They just schooled us in the craft of painting but I was more interested in ideas about art.
I read broadly, but mostly on literature, philosophy and art, everything from Socrates to Kafka to Duchamp. I spent so much time in the library, the librarians knew my name and became my friends.
Capital idea
I worked for a few years in Gansu province after graduating but I really wanted to go to Beijing, where many artists were gravitating at the time. In 1997, I finally made it. I had originally wanted to live in Yuanmingyuan Artists’ Village, in Haidian district, but the authorities had already evicted the artists and curtailed their activities there.
I had nowhere to go and I didn’t really know anyone, so I spent the first six months sleeping in the dormitory of the Renmin University of China, where my friend Li Lei was undertaking a PhD. Then I found a small room near the Communication University of China.
Getting physical
In 1999, I started to make my first performance artworks. Performance art is completely different from traditional art. Basically, in a traditional sense, the works that the artist thinks are good are displayed to an audience in a gallery. Performance art is different in that the artist shares the process of creation before an audience in real time, sometimes even involving the audience in that process.
It is a moment and at the end of the performance the work ceases to exist. That means you can’t buy it, you can only make it or experience it. As we couldn’t yet participate in the performance art world beyond China, we decided to bring it to us. Shu Yang, Zhu Ming and I launched the first ever Open International Performance Art Festival in Beijing (in 2000).
Performance art has infinite possibilities to expand the boundaries of human expression
We held it in a small village in Huairou District. It was ultimately cut short by the police and we had to finish up at my house. It didn’t matter. My work won me some attention and, in 2001, I was invited to Helsinki, in Finland, to perform at an art festival. It was my first time overseas, and a really exciting experience.
The world stage
Over the next few years I travelled to various countries attending performance art festivals, in North and Central America, all over Europe as well as elsewhere in Asia. We also held an open festival every year in China and that gradually grew in size and prestige.
By 2007 I felt we needed a space exclusively for performance art so I rented an empty gallery inside the 798 Art District in Beijing. We held the eighth and ninth editions of the Open there. Then in 2009, I was able to sell a family home to finance the 10th Open International Performance Art Festival.
It was enormous; to my knowledge, the biggest in performance art history. It lasted eight weeks, with one guest curator a week, and 352 artists from 50 countries participating. I had over 100 volunteers helping me realise the festival, mostly students from art schools in Beijing and nearby provinces.
We had no trouble from the authorities at all. Tourists and the general public could just show up to watch any given performance on any given day. Looking back, I realise that was a very special time.
Creative cooking
The late 2000s was such a creative and free period in Beijing, I got swept up in it all. But the Open cost me a lot of money and rent was rising rapidly. So, in 2012, I moved to Songzhuang art colony, on the outer limits of Beijing, which was much cheaper. But I still needed an income.
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I knew I was a good cook, and everyone loves Sichuan food in north China, so I partnered with a friend and opened Po Spicy Noodles. Business was good but after two years, the landlord didn’t renew our tenancy agreement. Lots of people nagged me to find a new place, so, in 2015, I found a small courtyard house and together with my partner, Yi Fei, opened Open Weidao (Flavour).
We did classic Sichuan food with a twist, adding fusion elements based on my experiences dining overseas. In China, food safety remains an issue so I tried my best to ensure the quality of all the raw ingredients. Our place was really popular, especially among the artists in the area. I sometimes imagine in a past life I must have been a chef.
Enjoying a tipple
Spicy Sichuan food goes really well with beer but I never drank much after getting sick from alcohol in my student days in Lanzhou. That was until 2015, when I had the opportunity to go to Belgium to do some performance art. After tasting Belgian beers, I learned beer could be really delicious.
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On returning to China I found the craft beer craze was sweeping the country. I learned about fruit beers, ales, stout, sour beer and so on. I love tasting different flavours and hosted a few beer tasting evenings in my restaurant. I stocked Open Weidao’s fridge with beer from all over the world. Sichuan food never tasted so good.
Country life
In 2018, our landlord in Songzhuang doubled our rent, essentially ending Open Weidao as a profitable endeavour. I was looking for a new opportunity when a friend asked if I wanted to go to rural Zhejiang, where a village called Xiayu, near Quzhou City, was developing into an art village.
At first I was reluctant to leave Beijing, but when I visited, I liked it very much. It’s a beautiful place with amazing scenery and no air pollution. The locals are sincere and friendly, and there are a few other artists in residence helping to develop the village sensitively and aesthetically.
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I’ve rented a house and renovated it into the latest incarnation of my Open Art Studio. My only regret is that, for the past two years, due to the pandemic, it has essentially been impossible to hold the Open International Performance Art Festival. This remains my raison d’être.
Performance art has infinite possibilities to expand the boundaries of human expression, so I hope one day to establish an international artist residency project in the village. Our troubled world needs to maintain a conversation and that conversation can happen through art.
