Hong Kong Chinese art exhibition examines tension between ideology and the individual
Dancing dissected frogs, neon-lit face and body piercings, stiff formal dancers and abandoned nightclubs feature in ‘After Party: Collective Dance and Individual Gymnastics’ at Blindspot Gallery
Roland Barthes, the French cultural theorist, spent three weeks in China in 1974 as part of propaganda tour organised by Beijing, and he appeared to have sulked through most of it.
Reacting to the cliché-spouting guide’s comment that “Chinese gymnastics” (which probably meant tai chi) had benefits “for body and mind”, Barthes entertained himself by jotting down in his notebook mens fada in corpore salop (a dull mind in a slutty body), misquoting the Latin phrase for “a sound mind in a sound body”.
That entry in his book Travels in China wasn’t directed at the formulaic collective dancing that he witnessed with great distress in the country’s schools, factories and public squares, but it somehow goes with his observation of how the dancers moved with hysterical passion while being the frigid, passive instruments of ideology.
Barthes’ notes are the starting point for an intriguing exhibition about the tension between ideological control and the individual will.
Some of the video images featured in “After Party: Collective Dance and Individual Gymnastics”, appear to mock, as Barthes did, the deadening effect that politics had on dance. Reanimation!Underwater Zombie frog ballet! by Lu Yang shows a row of dissected frogs performing a morbid dance as their dead muscles are stimulated by electric currents.