“A History Written by Our Bodies”: Artistic Activism and the Agonistic Chinese Voice of Mad For Real's Performances at the End of the Twentieth Century.

Katie Hill, A History Written by Our Bodies: Artistic Activism and the Agonistic Chinese Voice of Mad For Real's Performances at the end of the Twentieth Century. Courtesy of Harvard University.

Department of History of Art and Architecture, Harvard University, presents Katie Hill, A History Written by Our Bodies: Artistic Activism and the Agonistic Chinese Voice of Mad For Real's Performances at the end of the Twentieth Century.

Introduced by Eugene Wang, Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Professor of Asian Art, Harvard, Dr. Katie Hill’s talk will discuss the work of Mad For Real, a performance duo (Cai Yuan and JJ Xi) who work between Britain and China and became known for pioneering interventional performance in the public space using the city of London as a cultural canvas. Her talk explores the duo’s artistic activism at the end of the twentieth century in the context of transcultural practice and how the artists’ bodies and voices act to assert a certain kind of Chinese presence onto a political and cultural landscape at a particular moment in time within the broader framework of neocolonialism. This talk is drawn from her recently published chapter in Yeh and Thorpe (eds.) Contesting British Chinese Culture (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018).

Date: April 29, 2019

Time: 4:30 pm - 6:30 pm

Venue: HAA Classroom 422, Arthur M. Sackler Building 485 Broadway, Cambridge, MA 02138, United States.