An hourglass: grains of sand chase each other in the glass of the skin enclosing a turned and turned body, scanning the revolutions of everyday life. Time: first and foremost that of the now, the neck through which the grains of the past, memories, and traditions converge, rolling towards an uncertain future, hopes alongside fears. The body is therefore temporal, as well as spatial, naturally, and it remains so, inevitably: outside the performance, beyond the curtain, downstage, the hourglass is consumed and it persists.
Can the unidirectional rhythm marked by the hourglass be subverted? Is it possible to make the grains of sand flow towards other necks? Or can one autonomously overturn the hourglass of one’s own body, counter-archiving and self-directing one’s own present?
These (and others) are the questions that mark the art-life of Paolo Peng Shuai 彭帅: born in Xiangtan 湘潭 (Hunan 湖南), in 1995, at the age of nine, he moved with his parents to Reggio Emilia, Italy. In 2016 he moved to Milan where he obtained his BFA and MFA from the Brera Academy of Fine Arts, and where he has lived and worked ever since. As suggested by the hybridity of his name, the question of personal identity characterises his daily life and, inevitably, his entire artistic journey: addressing issues of cultural identity through the mediums of figurative and performative art, he questions the definition of his personal identity, drawing inspiration from his own everyday experience. In his multiform and multidisciplinary practice, the body occupies a space – and time – of particular importance: as will be seen below, the notion of body is to be understood in an extended manner, no longer as an exclusive physical presence. Body will be virtual, it will be symbolic-metaphorical, extending beyond the human anatomy to the plant world.
However, first of all, this body will be temporal: in Peng’s practice, time does not correspond exclusively to the duration of the artwork, but operates throughout life, perpetually shaping his artistic and personal identity. While not engaging in an explicitly archival practice, the artist utilises the temporality of the archive to appropriate and overturn the time of history, taking a stand «against the exacerbation of systems of identifying and profiling people» (Baldacci 2016, 27). In the background, there are two great coercive categorisations that continue to keep the artist trapped in the upper half of the hourglass: on the one hand, Chineseness, the essentialisation – and often racialisation – of a system of characteristics that, starting from physiognomic attributes, takes possession of values, memories, and even everyday behaviour (Ong 1999, Ang 2012, Chun 2017). On the other hand, the value of diaspora that can be transfigured into the dis-value of diasporicism, a term I coined myself in the course of my previous research to highlight the propensity to misuse the term – and the related idea – of diaspora, associating it with contexts and circumstances that can and indeed must go beyond the limited (and limiting) diasporic perspective (Cacciaguerra 2023).
When observed from a distance, the route of Peng seems to trace a trajectory of increasing awareness in which his body, a simulacrum of his person, modulates his voice from whispering to deflagration, up to a convinced assertion.
The work I Am (2019) is to be found in an initial whispering of the body, which inevitably poses a question linked to its video nature: are we dealing with a body? Is a body as reproduction, a meta-body, or a virtual body, detached from the spatio-temporal presence of the performative instant, capable of maintaining its own value and strength? Without wishing to lead further into this question, I believe it is more effective to refer to the broader concept of presence. In I Am Peng reproduces his own presence through a body that is still germinally aware: the video shows the artist, shot from the waist up, while repeating the formular expression that gives the installation its title in various languages, in a process that is simultaneously mantra, dialogue, transmission and declaration.
Although in a negative phase of self-assertion, the process of repetition and dissolution is part of a recurring practice in that research on the body that has characterised the Chinese scene since the early 1990s: the question of identity that interrogates Chinese artists is triggered first of all by the violent disillusionment following the events of Tiananmen Square in 1989 and further nourished by the experience of the diaspora in which many of them are involved. It is in this context that Zhang Huan 张洹, the protagonist of the most interesting and extreme bodily operations in the Chinese context, conceived the performance Family Tree 家谱 (2000). The ink that impresses the characters on the artist’s skin surface gradually obscures his face, in parallel with the arrival of the night. At the end of the process, the artist confesses: “I cannot tell who I am. My identity has disappeared” (Zhang 2000). The repetition of strong identity elements corresponds to a repeated affirmation of his own identity as a Chinese, which nevertheless results in its dissolution and the erasure of his person.
In Paolo Peng Shuai this practice of cancellation by accumulation no longer plays with the symbolic element of ‘tradition’, but rather embodies the performative act of impersonification: the process of imitation (mofang 模仿) is here not to be understood in continuity with traditional Chinese artistic practices – in which the copy of the ancient is an essential step in the formation of the personal style of painters and calligraphers. ‘Imitation’ is not copying, but rather the symbolic re-production of different identities (butong de shenfen 不同的身份): Peng in the reiteration of the existential statement “I Am” dresses the skins of the identities whose verbal gesture he reproduces; body, skin, physiognomy converge in the word.
However, it is worth remembering that it is not about re-enactment: “a repetition of an action will never allow us to relive the original action, because the repeated action will always be different” (O’Reilly 2011, 65). In Peng’s body and voice, different experiences, pasts, spatialities and temporalities converge: the artist exposes his ego through the instrument of the body, which is an “evidence of identification” (Zhang 2007), representation of a subjectivity that progressively blurs. Affirmation at this point leaves room for a fundamental question: Am I? It is not only an existential interrogation of the self; beyond that lies the affirmation of a potentiality: that of being anyone. Against this question, the repeated manifestation of hetero-geneous identities is creatively exploited by the artist to dissolve the duality between identity and image by using negation for the purpose of interrogative assertion; in the words of Homi Bhabha, it takes the form of «The reflection of the self that develops in the symbolic consciousness of the sign. It marks out the discursive space from which The real Me emerges (initially as an assertion of the authenticity of the person) and then lingers to reverberate – The real Me? – as a questioning of identity» (Bhabha 1994, 49).
Therefore, Peng’s body is not a victim of this action of erasure by accumulation, instinctively configured as cultural, aesthetic, and personal negation. It is above all an active questioning, beyond negation, which is paradigmatic of the artistic and human condition of the contemporary subject. I Am confronts us with the daily question that challenges the life of the artist: individual annihilation or reaching a human essence, where ethnic, aesthetic, and linguistic individualities are melted?
The inquisitorial annihilation of the body – physical and metaphorical – emerges as a recurring practice in order to embody those processes of «confusion, exploration and reinterpretation of identity» (Peng 2020) that are intertwined in his persona. Instinctive Reaction (2020) is in this respect a key work in the artist’s entire production, which can be used as a legend in the reading of the spatio-temporal map of his identity: employing the medium of performance, the action is entirely constructed through symbols and stereotypes, which characterise the three fundamental elements of the work.
First of all, the audio, consisting of several voices shouting expressions of mockery in Chinese, Italian and English. They refer to the second element of the performance, that of the chair, linked to what the curator Silvia Vannacci defines as «the passive aspect of the identity path» (Vannacci 2022): the white chair shows inscriptions in different languages, displaying commonplaces, insults and stereotypes. They are the words that the artist has been hearing addressed to himself after leaving China and arriving in Italy. Insults in Italian – such as “occhi a mandorla” (almond eyes), “mangia-riso” (rice-eater), “ravioli”, “coronavirus”, “Bruce Lee” – mix with those in Chinese, either as patriotic reminders of his Chineseness or as critics of his inadequacy consequently to his move to Italy: huangzhongren 黄种人 “person of the Mongolian race”, hanjian 汉奸 “traitor of the Han”, and haigui 海龟, “sea turtle”. Lastly, the epithet that sums up the essence of the performance, that of xiangjiao ren 香蕉人, literally “banana-man”: originally bearing a derogatory meaning, it is a metaphor for those Chinese citizens whose interiority has in some way become “westernised”, thus yellow on the outside and white on the inside. As such, it is representative of the dilemma behind Peng’s condition as someone accused of betraying their “yellow” lookalikes with a “white” cultural belonging. In the performance, the banana itself becomes an instrument in the hands of the artist, in a reiterative act of violence: sitting on the chair in the middle of some skins, Paolo Peng Shuai rhythmically peels and swallows the bananas, unexpressive while listening to the audio track, resulting in a sense of disgust that brings to the final instinctive reaction of regurgitation.
The performance is quite eloquent in displaying the artist’s daily sense of dismay: identity is at the very core of his artistic reflection, yet remaining an ongoing issue marked by an in-betweenness in which he is seemingly trapped. However, considering the performance simply as a “failure of identity belonging” (Vannacci 2020) ignores the artist’s active performativity. The use of the nude body constitutes above all the affirmation of Peng’s subjective identity as a human individual. Beyond this, the bare skin of Peng’s body simultaneously encapsulates and manifests that racialisation of the Asia-related displaced subject shouted by the skins of the first artists who arrived in Europe and the US in the 1990s: stereotypical attributions, religious suggestions and common objects, deconstructed and reconstructed, aesthetically and performatively actualise the subject’s potential to appropriate and redefine «the relationships between texts and contexts» (Gladston 2007, 105).
On the other hand, the fragile skin shell that offers itself to the eyes of the audience makes the artist’s vulnerability frighteningly clear: since, as Butler reminds us «each of us is constituted politically in part by virtue of the social vulnerability of our bodies» (Butler 2004, 20), the sounds, gazes, and symbols penetrating Peng’s flesh do not represent a passive individual masochism; we are faced with a practice, voluntarily cathartic, that starts from the individual with a collective potential, in which memories and post-memories are made his own by the artist and self-inflicted in order to neutralise their effects.
As theorised by Lingchei Letty Chen, the concept of post-memory is to be recognised as fundamental to the diasporic experience in the direction of diasporicism: «the existential condition of the diaspora continues on with future generations in the mediated representations of the first generation’s memories, stories, and artefacts» (Chen 2015, 59). It nourishes a generational transmission of a meta-pain that is re-acted by later generations, transferring a healing pain for the spirit back to the body.
Self-harm as a cure recurs in Chinese performance practice, drawing on ancient medical and meditative practices. The aforementioned Zhang Huan 张洹 exposes his own body to conditions on the edge of survival, while retaining an attitude of meditative impassivity – see for instance 12 Square Metres (1995) and Pilgrimage – Wind and Water in New York (1998); beside him, Ma Liuming 马六明, by means of his transgender alter ego Fen-Ma Liuming 芬-马六明, does not merely disrupt gender categories, but goes so far as to subject his own body to artificial suffering and amplification that challenge the boundaries of the human itself – see Fen-Ma Liuming’s Lunch 1 (1994) and Fen-Ma Liuming Walks the Great Wall (1998).
However, Paolol Peng Shuai’s bananas are not mere instruments for challenging his own body, but symbolic external bodies that themselves penetrate, poisonous, within his person charged with socio-racial meanings. I believe that this physical and symbolic suffering finds a more explicative parallel in He Chengyao 何成瑤, who in 2002 enacted the performance 99 Needles. On her first day of menstruation, the artist asked a doctor friend to apply ninety-nine needles to her entire body, which soon led to her fainting (Welland 2019, 233-234). The performative act is but the cathartic manifestation of the post-mnemonic suffering of the conditions suffered by her mother, guilty of the double crime of being a woman and mentally ill (Huber, Zhao 2013, 77), and for this reason victim of the medical and social harassment reproduced by He in her artistic practice.
In light of this, in the practice of Peng the elements of the chair and the banana, as symbols of mockery and emblematic of the imposition of a hetero-induced identity, are not simply denied tools of torture, but actively re-enacted by Peng as creative instruments, contested between the pedagogical in which they are generated and the performative which results from the artist’s appropriation of them. Peng’s performance removes the stereotype from that state of simplification as a fixated form of representation (Bhabha 1994, 75). Stereotype is effectively used and internalised in a relationship of identification with the artist. In this sense, the deconstructive action that the artist performs on and through stereotypes has «the potential to productively interact with, rather simply overwrite, existing categories of meaning» (Gladston 2007, 32).
The trajectory, or rather the trajectories traced by Peng follow paradoxically inverted paths: on the one hand, there is an extension of the body, which from an isolated motionless object conquers the physical space altered by alien forms and objects that become symbolic bodies themselves; on the other hand, there is an apparent involution of the medium of representation, which goes from the virtual back to the concrete, from the verbal expression to the primitive process of nourishment. However, this trajectory is perfectly coherent with the current point of arrival of Peng’s art, which he himself describes as “parasitic” because it «feeds on change and is always ready to adapt to a new host body» (Peng in Chinellato 2022): increasingly distant from a strictly human conception of the body, his research has now come to investigate the biological-political processes of plant migration, in what he himself has called Economadism. The artist defines it as «the study of the environmental and thus cultural, anthropological and psychological conditions of the nomadic state of the human subject, considered in transit from a unitary, homogeneous and controllable dimension to a fluid, evolving and hybrid one» (Peng in De Fabritiis 2023). Vegetables and environments have become manifestations of a performative practice that is no longer instantaneous, and thus localised, but processual and therefore linked to the temporal dimension of the migrative condition.
The video installation Shuǐqín (2023) is the result of a processual activity by Peng Shuai, which offers a glimpse into the connection between body, nature, and memory: cultivating wild celery (shuǐ qín 水芹), native to China on the banks of the Po River, the artists manages to turn these places into generational bridges between past and present. The place of his childhood and memory, China, merges with that of the present, the Po River, in a metaphorization of his nomadic condition where the spatial dimension is functional to the temporal one. Peng establishes an intimate dialogue between his own personal past and present: the use of the ChangShan-ese dialect in the recording of the poem read out in the background of the installation and the sounds of nature recorded on the Po river echoes the link with his own family – a family of cooks and farmers, and of shamans and witches before that. He thus constructs a fragmentary archive of references that is not a mere «passive guardian of an inheritance but rather an active agent that shapes personal identity and social and cultural memory» (Baldacci 2016, 26).
The counter-archival practice is continued in the project Giardino Movente (Moving Garden) (2023): such processual installation ignites that “reactivation of time” (Baldacci, Nicastro, Sforzini 2022) that challenges the past to transform history into a possible and perpetual becoming, a site for invention and renewal. The work is a nomadic plant platform, moving around several cities, made up of allogeneic cultivations. Cultivating five plants of Chinese origin – coriander, chives, bok-choy, Sichuan chilli, and artemisia àicǎo – becomes a metaphor for the minority resistance, not only individual but communitarian: «the very bodies for which we struggle are not quite ever only our own» (Butler 2004, 22). These plants, considered wild, require no care and are able to withstand very different temperatures and environments: Paolo Peng Shuai’s (eco)nomadism goes hand in hand with a capacity for adaptation and transformation that is paradigmatic of his identity and of that of an entire so-called “sino-italian” community. As such, dislocation, contamination, hybridity become pragmatically creative processes, revealing a spontaneous coexistence with deep roots.
In the analysis of the vegetable hybridization taking place in the province of Prato, Leone Contini, artist and anthropologist, a few years ago, (more or less) implicitly intertwined the human and the plant worlds through the ever misunderstood and mistreated concept of “acclimatisation” asserting that: «Acclimatisation is no longer a fact imposed within the colonial power relationship (so to put the subjugated Other to good use), but a process that is generated ‘naturally’ in the demographic upheaval of contemporary migrations. After all, seeds are by definition ‘migrants’, being capsules for the transport of genetic information across geographies and, since the dawn of agriculture, across human communities» (Contini 2019).
The seeds that compose Peng’s economadism germinate in a “nomadic archive”, which stands as a mode of action that invests the entire proceeding, indissolubly intertwining two inextricably conceptions of “body”, which constitute the lenses through which I would like to observe his works: time and object.
When talking about time, in the practice of Peng it does not correspond exclusively to the duration of the performative act: his art, his body, and his whole person are in the arena of the life-time where an ever-lasting artistic and personal identity construction operates. The artist’s private sphere becomes a tool of that temporal reactivation which we could observe for example in the performative action of Teh Ching Hsieh 謝德慶. Particularly useful here is the concept he turned into daily artistic practice, that of passive vitalism: «there are no visible heroics played to spectators […] rather there is a sustained passivity and inertia, action as inaction as sustained processes of lived subjection» (Jagodzinski 2019, 59). Observing, for example, the work One Year Performance 1980-1981, the act of clocking on to a worker’s time clock on the hour, every hour, for a whole year is nothing but the trace left by the man of a time already past, that nevertheless continues, constant, to pass in the present. Likewise, what we see in Peng’s Shuiqin is nothing but a snapshot of the life of the artist, in which converge the past, present, and future times of his daily life: «Art and life are constantly making and unmaking one another» (Jagodzinski 2019, 73).
In the economadic path walked by the artist, his body goes through the life-time following the fragmentary traces of an identity deliberately devoted to dissipating, in its unity: the subject, constantly nomadic, is made up of impersonal individuations, of pre-individual singularities (Deleuze 2004, 58). Body is thus the object/subject able to enact a counter-archive characterised by a non-linear time: «[it is] a cartography made of linguistic-visual fragments and object-relics, which have been taken from their original context to be inserted into a new spatial dimension, where thematic-formal correspondences and distances, temporal breaks and multiple meanings coexist» (Baldacci 2016, 127).
The use of the word “object” does not refer to any grammatical passivity, but rather to an active actionality of objective tools in the chrono-material cartography enacted by Peng. Borrowing the words of Scotini, Peng’s practice corresponds to an empirical particularism, a «knowledge ‘through objects’ and against conceptual abstraction» (Scotini 2022, 270). The object – the banana, the shuǐqín, the allochthonous plant – becomes a symbolic and political body that archivally narrates a variety of collective and individual stories.
Peng Shuai’s cumulative practice somehow reflects that temporal accumulation through objects carried out by Mao Tongqiang 毛同強: the accumulation of enormous quantities of objects becomes a collective narrative of time. This is the case, for example, of Tools (2008) , which is the result of a three-year research that led to the collection of about 30,000 sickles and hammers. The objects – leaving aside their potentially political value – are not merely accumulated in an anonymous, shapeless pile: «each piece is meticulously numbered and classified, but also positioned according to a basic classification that recognizes identities and differences, with all the sickles on one side, and all the hammers on the other» (Scotini 2018). As such, objects become the subjects of Mao’s archival narrative: although the collective, cumulative character prevails over the individual in the sensory perception of the work, which overwhelms the observer spatially, each individual tool becomes even more a temporal device: «a deposit of lived life» (Scotini 2022, 273).
Returning to Paolo Peng Shuai’s practice, his economadism is configured as a sort of archive of weeds (lit. “erbacce”): «[those] who have managed to resist and survive in different environmental conditions» (Peng, in Arnaudo 2023). The wild plants and, even before them, the seeds, are physically and metaphorically «capsules for the transport of genetic information» (Contini 2019); one’s own history, individual and collective, is not passively archived by the artist in a linear narrative made of causes and effects, but rather in an immanent co-presence of events, objects, temporalities. It is for this reason that Paolo Peng Shuai’s economadism archive eludes official historical narratives and nationalist identity impositions. Instead, it ignites «a device that can be continuously de-archived or re-archived» (Scotini 2022, 23), giving rise to a proliferation of ever-new, parallel, and co-present assemblages.
It would be both coherent and intellectually honest at this point to check whether the initial questions have in fact been answered: Can the unidirectional rhythm marked by the hourglass be subverted? Is it possible to make the grains of sand flow towards other necks? Or can one autonomously overturn the hourglass of one’s own body, counter-archiving and self-directing one’s own present? The feeling, not to be blamed, might be that of having lost, during this journey, the centrality of the body, or at least that recurring conception of the body that ties it inseparably to human anatomy. However, the hope is that it has been understood through the words spent above that this is no longer sufficient for contemporary life: to speak of the temporal body not only allows us to emphasise once again its intrinsic transience, but, much more usefully, to highlight its characteristic as a dispositif (Foucault 1999), performatively capable of activating time against the pedagogy of history. It is in the light of this, then, that the conception of the body extends to everything that is directly and indirectly touched by this body.
Paolo Peng Shuai, in his “weed” condition, is perhaps the most faithful representation of contemporaneity: his economadism not only attempts to overcome the identity question but question the human/body conception and its regime itself. He comes somehow to suggest the possibility of new interspecies interactions, which could produce new models for the human action itself, starting from the fundamental acknowledgement that «migration, from a planetary point of view, is not a purely human phenomenon: all living beings voluntarily or involuntarily are part of this movement, collaborating and intertwining with each other» (Peng, in Arnaudo 2023). As stressed above, Peng’s economadic experience is not a mere geographical one: psychological, sociological, and anthropological factors converge in his person, who actively acts in and on the temporal dimension. The individual claims their space of action in relation to extremes that, although spatially conceptualised, are in fact temporal. As such, their temporal body acquires contemporaneity over time, deconstructed and re-appropriated by the subject who claims their time: the hourglass has finally been broken.
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Giacomo Cacciaguerra is a PhD candidate at Ca’ Foscari University (Venice), currently holds the position of teaching assistant at the same university for the course ‘History of Chinese Art’. He earned both his bachelor’s and master’s degrees from Ca’ Foscari (2020, 2023). In his current research – as well as in his MA dissertation, “Art as Third Space: third-space hybridity in contemporary art” – he focuses on China-related artistic production outside the PRC, blending an art-historical approach with a socio-anthropological one. His interests broadly encompass contemporary Chinese art in a broad sense, with a particular emphasis on issues of cultural identity, self-representation, and visual culture.