Chinese author and filmmaker Xiaolu Guo’s five lives

When Xiaolu Guo was a student at Beijing’s prestigious Film Academy, in the early 1990s, she found herself drawn towards a varied group of avant garde artists. As she writes in her new book, Once Upon a Time in the East, the more memorable works of the period included Yue Minjun’s absurd “Laughing Man” portraits and Zhang Huan’s 12 Square Metres, a piece of performance art staged in a public toilet.

Guo reserves special affection for the anonymous “shock artists” who practised ever more outrageous forms of xing wei yi shu (“behaviour art”). At one happening on the Great Wall, Guo saw a young man tattoo his 15-digit ID number onto bleeding skin, another eat a meal of placenta, and watched someone else paint their penis red before making vigorous love to the floor. The evening ended in a police raid, albeit a rather half-hearted one, and a reprimand from the school.

“I loved those crazy performances,” Guo writes of these illegal provocations that she nevertheless tired of as she developed her own career as a writer, filmmaker and feminist. “It was too macho and too blunt, to put it simply. What these artists did was give their middle finger to the official talk of the People’s Daily. But we young people didn’t give a damn about the People’s Daily ...”

Now 44, Guo has been thinking back on these formative days, and not only because her new book includes remini­scen­ces of those times. She detects something of the defiance of those Beijing enfants terribles in the protests springing up after Brexit and the election of Donald Trump.

“After Brexit, it was very depressing. Immediately I felt this anger. I felt this atmosphere which I had when I was in Beijing as a 20-something. I thought, ‘Maybe this is good. It generates public thinking. It motivates the lazy intellectuals,’” she laughs.

Guo is well-placed to comment. Resident in London since 2002, she now divides her time between Hackney, a rapidly gentrifying borough in the east of the British capital, and Berlin, Germany. I suspect, however, that wherever Guo lives, she will always be drawn to just this sort of social and political upheaval. Her best writing – in novels such as A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers (2007) and I Am China (2014) – is fuelled by cultural and geographical dislocation, by characters striving to find their place in unsettling environments. As a filmmaker, she is fascinated by the outsider, whether this is a poverty-stricken couple building roads before the 2008 Beijing Olympics (The Concrete Revolution; 2004) or London’s demi-monde of “beggars, gangsters, and working class heroes” (Late at Night; 2013).