by Li Xianting

     Xiao Yu’s works have a romantic and poetic form, yet beneath this exterior lurks a sense of horror. Perhaps it is better to say that Xiao Yu expresses his anguish in a romantic and poetic form. His work reminds me of classical  tragedies, where desolation and grief are veiled by beauty and splendour.

     In several recent works, he has employed different animal parts to fabricate strange new ‘beings’: Ran incorporates body parts from a rabbit, a bird and a baby; Jiu is constructed from laboratory mice; and Wu combines portions of a rabbit and a duck. This series of three works prompts us to think of cloming, of our sophisticated hi-tech and increasingly artificial living environment.

     For the three man exhibition entitled Anguish, Xiao Yu. presented withered tree roots rising from sand with the strange animals from Wu resting amongst the roots. The work inspired more pain than curiosity. The more science and technology progress, the more artificial man’s living environment becomes. Nature is plundered, destroyed and increasingly alienated from man. In China, the destruction of nature is particularly frantic and unbridled, usually performed under the guise of creating an ever more beautiful future. It is the ‘beauty’ of our future that frightens us this is the vision of a plausible future existence that Xiao Yu tries to convey. In his introduction to Jiu, Xiao Yu describes the being as ‘a small-sized animal of great reproductive capacity and adaptability, the future master race’. The animal parts used in Jiu were garnered from a laboratory, those places in which future words are bred, This is an artist expressing fear of the future. Man is constantly inventing new gadgets and ideas to make life easier but that ultimately control man -these fears Xiao Yu reflects in his works. Xiao Yu and friends, like Zhu Yu and Sun Yuan, are the first artists in China to have used human bodies in their creative work. It no doubt involves questions of morality, which also relate to the culture of death. I am reminded of the British artist Damien Hirst, who lived with a corpse for several days in order to create a work. He later remarked that initially he was frightened, but came to see the corpse as nothing more than an object. The change in the thinking and sensations experienced by Hirst in the days with a corpse, passed a new realisation to contemporary artists: a corpse is no different from any other thing, it is merely an object. From ancient to contemporary times, man has chosen to define the dead in cultural terms. Typical of such cultural concepts are the luxurious funeral ceremonies that prevailed in ancient China. When divorced from cultural implications, a corpse is just a corpse, simply an object as any other material.

     We each encounter corpses at various times in the course of our lives. Due to its cultural association and specific visual and psychological effect, a corpse is likely to create a lasting impression, which may shape subsequent perceptions. In talking about his creative experience, Xiao Yu recalled the impression he received when he first saw a corpse as a boy of nine: ’It was a winter morning of 1974. My friends and I were jogging when ghe front of our file broke out in sudden chaos. Iran up to find my friends holding a hard and pinkish object. It was a six-month-old baby, naked and stiff with a red thread around its neck. At the time, none of us were scared at all. I found mysely wondering what his mother looked like, the pattern and design of the family quilt, and how many brothers or sisters he might have had. Strangely enough, I was sure that this was a child without a father...

     Later in the summer of 1997 in Chongqing, Sichuan province, while crossing a road I noticed a pool of blood beside a van. The windscreen of the van was smashed. Bystanders were all gabbling their account of what they had seen. An image kept flashing before my eyes of a man being thrown through the windscreen. But why was there blood outside of the van? I spent a whole afternoon pondering all possible reasons. Association occupies more than half of my life.” This, Xiao Yu’s use of body parts in his works is not something that came out of the blue, Chinese art academies have stuck to the academic tradition of their European counterparts. Still today, in order to learn anatomy, art students often study corpses, sometimes observing dissections in hospitals, For Chinese artists, the human body has long since become a common ‘object’, divested of all mystery an taboo.

    We read that for another work, Damien Hirst planned to dissect his grandmother, who was said to have given her consent. In the end, he did not do it, either because of the stringent Western legal governance, or because of severe religious taboos. In China, an authoritarian society without much Western-style freedom on one hand, and an anarchic society characterised by extreme freedom on the other, there are greater possibilities for artistic experimentation. Moreover, with the waning of traditional Chinese culture, traditional values have long since been lost. In the Han-dominated regions, in particular, except for the national ideology of Chinese Socialism, there is almost no religious dominion to exercise any regulative force. There are neither religious nor legal restrictions against Chinese artists using bodies in their art. Artists like Xiao Yu deal with contemporary artistic history, which encourages the development of new materials. In this respect, Xiao Yu and his peers are pioneering the use of such new materials as the human body.