Village House: Liz Adamson and Rania Ho Sayizheng III 2016 Tuanjjehu Park Beijing

This work comprised of a film and a performance, made byartists Liz Adamson and Rania Ho for the international performance art event, Sayizheng III at Tuanjihu Park in the heart of the CBD or Central Business District of Beijing.

 Curated by Chinese artist Zhao Tianji and Dutch artist Zoro Feigl, Sayizheng III is the third in a series of exhibitions featuring artistic interventions in the city’s public places. Twenty-two Chinese, European and American artists were invited to produce art performances to challenge an audience not normally reached by theart world.

This people’s park still embodies the remains of socialist utopian ideals to many Beijingers. Adamson and Ho occupied a Chinese summerhouse there by Solidarity Lake amongst card players and musicians playing the erhu. Working from noon to the park’s closing, they filled the window space with what they call Wandou – Mandarin word for pea – and members of the public joined in with this, making beautiful tetrahedral structures from cocktail sticks and peas. Also shown was a film called ‘Village House’, made by Adamson and Ho while staying at a traditional village house in the Mongolian mountains close to a crumbling stretch of The Great Wall. The film depicted rural life, as property developers level and re-locate the village and its elderly population of chestnut farmers and was projected inside a purposefully lo-fi cardboard box theatre viewed by passers by on the edge of Solidarity Lake, surrounded by the CBD’s concrete forest.

 In keeping with their spirit of intervention and to remain beneath the radar of the Chinese authorities, the curators insisted that the only documentation by artists and invited visitors would be on private cell phones and distributed through social media which is itself state censored.

 Performed on a national holiday, Adamson and Ho’s exhibit drew considerable public attention creating dialogue and participation across a wide demographic mix.