He Chengyao’s first performance in 2001 saw the artist walking topless along the Great Wall of China. Her next audacious action, 99 Needles, involved self-administering acupuncture needles into her body. In this video performance work—Public Broadcast Exercises—from 2004, the artist wraps herself in tape and performs calisthenic (a kind of rhythmic exercise for the body’s large muscle types). The music she dances to is typically used in schools during mandatory exercise classes, suggesting a kind of social control. While she moves, she loosens the tight bonds she is wrapped in, liberating herself from the culturally-imposed, age-old practice of discipline—a consistent theme in her work. With He Chengyao’s time-based videos, performances and photography, she joins a powerful wave of female artists whose experimental works erupted in China in the 2000s, and have more recently been receiving attention in the West.
