Arts, Vol. 12, Pages 217: The Corpse and Humanist Discourse: Dead Bodies in Contemporary Chinese Art

Arts, Vol. 12, Pages 217: The Corpse and Humanist Discourse: Dead Bodies in Contemporary Chinese Art

Arts doi: 10.3390/arts12050217

Authors: Madeline Eschenburg

In the 1990s, a notable trend in contemporary Chinese art was the use of human corpses as material for installation art. These works were called derivative and societally harmful by critics and have been dismissed as anomalous in more recent scholarship. This paper will demonstrate that the use of corpses was the continuation of a a decade-long attempt to free art from a perceived unhealthy relationship with society through ridding the human body of ideological meaning. I argue that the use of dead bodies marks a metaphorical end to this preoccupation within the contemporary Chinese art world and paved the way for a fundamental shift in the way artists approached society as a whole.