Profile | Founder of China’s first performance art festival Chen Jin on growing up on the Tibetan plateau, and his sideline as a Sichuan food chef
- Chen Jin discovered performance art in the late 1990s in Beijing, where he was acquainted with the artists of the day, including Ai Weiwei and Zhang Dali
- He tells Thomas Bird about launching the annual Open International Performance Art Festival in 2000, which at its height attracted 352 artists from 50 countries
I was born in Baosheng Township, in the middle Sichuan province, in 1963, not long before the Cultural Revolution began. My mother, Zheng Dainong, worked in a nearby restaurant while my father was recruited as part of a campaign to develop the northwest and was sent to the arid province of Gansu.
Baosheng is now a part of Meishan city, which is famous throughout China as the birthplace of (the Northern Song dynasty statesman) Su Dongpo.
He went on to live all over China during his lifetime, painting, writing poems and drinking fine wine wherever he went.
In some strange way, my life’s journey has been a bit like his.
Hitting a plateau
My home corner of Sichuan was very lush and humid. As kids we spent our free time climbing in the forest-coated hills. School wasn’t very interesting, we mostly just read the newspaper and were made to repeat what we’d just read even though we didn’t really understand it.
My mother was eventually transferred to work alongside my father and, at the age of 15, I arrived to live with them in Gannan Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture (in southern Gansu), to finish my high-school studies. Gannan was at a high altitude and I remember the grassland was covered in lovely flowers and grazed by cattle.