Song Dong’s Performative Futility: Action, Impact, and Efficacy in Contemporary Chinese Performance Art

In a number of photographed performance works from the mid-1990s the artist Song Dong 宋冬 (b. 1966) dramatized futile actions that appeared to lack any lasting impact. This article examines these works as part of a larger group of contemporary performances in 1990s China that features futile acts and ephemeral effects. It explores the stakes of such artistic gestures during a period characterized by a contradictory sense of both socio-economic agency and political impotence. Informed by recent scholarship on performativity and mediation, the article develops the term “performative futility” to assess the ways in which Song’s works stage an expanded temporal relationship between the futile performance and its performance photograph. Reconceptualizing notions of action, impact, and efficacy, Song’s works rethink performance art’s longstanding emphasis on the immediacy of action and offer an alternative to the popular trope of the Chinese artist-as-dissident. Ultimately, the article sheds light on the highly nuanced ways in which Song and other Chinese performance artists of the period articulated new forms of agency and visibility within a postsocialist context. Challenging assumptions about the politics of contemporary art practice, it lays the groundwork for a more rigorous understanding of the politics of aesthetics in China.