+ Screen Scroll

THE EXPERIMENTAL PERFORMANCE Ping Feng ("Screen"), directed by visual-arts wizard Wang Jianwei, created a frenzied buzz throughout Beijing's theatrical circles even before it hit the stage.

Incorporating virtually every avant-garde technique-including video projection, puppetry, opaque screens, electronic music and on-stage videotaping—the play is based on one of the masterpieces of Chinese art, the Southern Tang scroll painting Han Xizai Gives a Banquet. The resulting performance abandons simple storytelling in favour of a visually dazzling work that uses an array of multimedia methods to rethink history.

The painting on which the work draws dates from the 10th century, when Emperor Li Yu commissioned Imperial Court artist Gu Hongzhong to record the details of state official Han Xizai's licentious life of women, food, music and poetry. (The painting is now housed in the museum of the Forbidden City in Beijing.)

For Wang, who first saw the painting in 1983, its complex images are a way of seeing history through multiple perspectives. His fascination with it led him to write a fictional version of the stories surrounding the painting. He then sought out China's leading experimental artists to interpret his vision.

In some ways, Ping Feng (also known by its French title, Paravent) presents a traditional allegory about the inherited forms of human interaction and social control that exist at the heart of contemporary Chinese society. However, Wang wanted to avoid the conventional use of history as an immovable symbol. Instead, his performance turns history on its head through a compelling multimedia stage performance.

"If you use [historical stories] only as simple ways to tell good from bad, then you can't recognize the richness of history," Wang says. "In the past, we used history to talk about today's situation... We should use history to doubt history."

Wang's artistic career epitomizes the fast-forward development of Chinese contemporary art. He began painting in the "revolutionary realism" style in the 1980s and moved on to internationally exhibited video installations and documentary films in the 1990s. Ping Feng is his first work for the stage.

When a representative from Belgium's Kunsten Festival des Arts came to Beijing at the end of 1998 and asked him if he had any ideas under development, Wang pulled out his notes about the painting that he'd been keeping since 1994. Staged in Beijing for three nights in April, the performance travelled to the Belgian festival and the Brighton Festival 2000 in England in May.

The set was created by three young artists, video artist Wu Ershan, electronic musician Chen Dili and set designer Zhang Hui, who last collaborated on an abstract dance piece for the 1999 International Jazz Festival in Beijing. The performers, clad in white suits, move around on a barren stage with a styrofoam-covered floor and three opaque screens that can be lowered and raised, created a timeless, placeless atmosphere.

The plot revolves around three of the painting's characters who are interrogated by the emperor's henchmen, the deceptions and betrayals of their relationships carefully dissected. But this explanation is far more coherent than the actual visual effect of the performance, which involves nameless characters who switch places and roles.

Puppeteers talk to their puppets and each other throughout the play, and the screens constantly rise and fall. Actors creep and crawl around the stage. The splintered visual effects engage the puzzled audience in a relationship with the performance that seems, appropriately, full of uncertainty and betrayal.

Unlike works by Meng Jinghui, another well-known experimental-theatre director in Beijing, this performance did not provide a night of light entertainment. Wang holds fast to an avant-garde idea, which states that "there are two kinds of plays: good plays and meaningful plays; meaningful plays do not have anything ready-made that you can refer to."

Val Wang is a freelance writer based in Beijing

by Val Wang
Far Eastern Economic Review