Performance in China developed in the 1980s and ’90s among close-knit artistic circles and audiences. Such performances relied heavily on photographs, video documentation, artist books, and oral accounts to be disseminated to subsequent audiences. Initially, these were considered documentations of performances rather than artworks in and of themselves. With time, the boundaries between performance and documentation blurred, and even further at the rise of conceptual photography in China during the mid-to-late-1990s.
Recently, a new generation of female artists including Pixy Liao, combine performance, photography, video, and new media to address a range of topics from the individual’s relationship to the changing cityscape to gender, sexuality, and behavior in the age of media culture.