Performance of Genders: Marking Masculine Feminine Identities through Body and Calligraphy

In performance art, the body becomes a means of orientation and placement and a medium of socialexperience. Being a combination of four elements (time, space, the artist’sbody,and the relationship between artist and public audience), the “body in act”reclaims one’s subjectivity through signifying gestures against cultural homologation, reactivatingthe alienating pragmatism of everyday life. Calligraphy, like performance art,focuses on physical execution, which materializesthe physical power of the artist and the dynamics of momentum. The focus is on the artist’saction involvingthe artist’sbody in a processual and spontaneous (but not unplanned) manner; the act of writing reaffirmsthe subjectivity of the calligrapher. Because of all these similarities between performance art and calligraphy, several contemporary Chinese artists attemptto interconnect these two art formsinto innovativepractices. Among them, we selected four artists (Sun Ping, Zhang Qiang, Echo Morgan,and Wu Xixia) who usecalligraphy in performative actions to conveynew conceptions related to gender (and) identity.Through the analysis of their most important works, this paper aims to explain how the use of calligraphy within the performative act reveals three significant socio-cultural themes: 1) the use of the body: the body is an active agent expressingthe self through writing and related movements; 2) the question of gender: calligraphy is used as a symbol of masculine power over women (i.e., Sun Ping and Zhang Qiang) or as a symbol of feminine (i.e., Echo Morgan and Wu Xixia); 3) the definition of identity: calligraphy relatesto identity as a symbol of Chinese tradition and culture, facilitating a contemporary reflection on gender identity.