From the Perspective of an Eye Witness

A Witness

Witness: On the afternoon of May 10th, a phone call informed me that there will be an art event at the Beijing Film Academy Theater the next day. The voice on the phone stressed how this would be nothing like I had ever seen before. In an elusive and mysterious tone, he said, "Make sure you are there on time between 2:30 and 3 p.m. They will lock the doors exactly at 3! Listen, I heard this is not even a play, there will never be any re-runs..." How strange, I thought... I canceled all my plans to find out what this was all about.

Witness: ---- The Beijing Film Academy is in the midst of the admission process. Prospective students are arriving from various regions for the entrance exam. With all kinds of people busily entering and exiting the main gate, it takes me quite a bit of effort to locate the theater. Once I walk into the narrow corridor leading to the theater, I see a TV monitor displaying a room with an eerie atmosphere. Spark! Suddenly a light flashes on the monitor. The view almost resembles an execution site. The taped-up words on the wall above the TV read, "Post-Sense Sensibility: Spree ." I take a quick glance at my watch, 2:50 p.m., I made it....

Witness: --- As I enter into the room at the end of the corridor, I see a big table on the right covered in a white table cloth, just like the one you would find in regular art exhibitions for drinks and guest books for comments and signatures. I reach out my arm to get a glass, but instead I feel cold air on my hand. Within a mere 50 cm distance from my hand, I see three heads! The closest guy is looking at me with a stupefied face. The second one winks at me with a smile, while the third shows me a panic-stricken face. The heads all look so real! Actually, it turns out that the heads belong to people squatting under the table with their heads sticking out from holes in the table. Their brains are surrounded with different kinds of meat products: ham, sausage, soy-sauce beef, lamb meat. A half-figure of the Buddha is leaning against the wall, standing quietly with his eyes looking down, so as to avoid the scene on the table. "The meat here is all clean," reads the line on the wall -- the meat can possibly be all sterilized, but who knows, people can do anything these days. Taking a piece of meat within 20 cm of someone's head is rather strange though, I should drink up a glass of water to forget all this. Hai! I groan, what is this? This can be water, it got to be some kind of alcoholic drink. I take another look at the table, but I see nothing else, only two empty kegs abandoned on the floor. There is nothing I can do I guess, I trash the glass and head further inside....

Witness: ---the interior space of the theater is high, more than 200 square meters. I see a mound structure of wood on the left, and a glass house beside it. In the center lies a gigantic spring mattress, and someone is filling it up with tomatoes that are vividly red. I realize now that this was the scene I just saw on the TV monitor outside the entrance. The whiteness of the cloths covering the two tables stand out the most to my eyes. Some people are looking at a pig's body hanging from the ceiling, with some live chickens tied to it. The chickens are batting their wings hysterically. After I make brief eye contact with the chickens, they begin to cry ecstatically. The whole scene resembles a sacrificial rite.

Witness: More than ten revolving paper lanterns are hung from the ceiling, and the shadows of various sound words are projected on their surface, turning around and around. "Ha Ha Ha Ha," here, "Ai, Ai," there, "Ze, Ze, Ze..." over there. The various sounds interlock and resound with each other, filling up the whole space, making us simply speechless. People are hissing to each other, with an anticipation of something about to happen.

Witness: There is a sudden commotion in the room. I see a strange looking person running back and forth in the middle of the space with silk stockings covering up his whole face. On top of his head is another head of a man. After another look, I see a man whose face resembles the head on top of the man in silk stockings, standing behind him. That fake head must have been copied off from this person. This couplet of fake and real human heads pass through the crowds, brushing close to you and all of a sudden even appearing right in front of you. The man from whom the fake head was copied is tiptoeing as if not knowing what is happening. After they have circled the room once, they sit down on the chair, with the two heads leaning on one another, they seem exhausted. At this moment, right next to them, one slightly chubby man begins to take his clothes off, leaving only his shorts. A few assistants begin to tie his body tightly using a leather belt on the table. At last an electronic massage chair enters the room to have this man rest inside. The lights are dimmed. Here I realize that the paper lanterns have stopped moving, I wonder when that happened, by now they have already moved high up in the ceiling. Rays of light are shedding upon the body of the semi-nude fat man, microphone placed close to his nostril. His body tied up so tightly, the leather belt embeds deeper and deeper into layers of his fat. His breathing grows heavier and heavier, and its sounds reach us through the microphone. At this moment, music slowly enters the scene and gradually overpowers the sound of breathing-----

Witness: At this point, the light focused on the fatty's body dims down, and instead the glass house placed next to him lights up. The audience shifts their attention. I shove through the crowd to get a closer look. With the rhythm of upbeat dance music, two people enter inside the glass house. One of their skin seems to have been all peeled off, exposing his muscle lines. It turns out that he is actually wearing a tight body-suit depicting the diagram of a dissected human body. He is holding a rabbit in his hand. As soon as he enters, he starts wiping the red surface of the glass house without saying a word. I can 抰 tell whether he is wiping blood or red paint. The woman with long hair behind him, somewhat attractive by the way, has her lower body covered in the same body suit with the muscle lines, but on her upper body she is wearing a formal suit. Once she enters inside the small room, she starts to sway her hips and legs, making her hair dance in the air. She is dancing a type of strip dancing you see in night clubs. With the sound effects, she creates various provocative body movements, sticking her tongue out from time to time. I feel the excitement welling up inside my own body and I also felt it among the surrounding crowds. While we forget the passing of the time, that man continues to wipe the blood on the glass diligently.

Witness: The music slowly fades out, and with it the light dims out. The space turns completely dark for two minutes. Everyone is at a loss. I hear something moving on my left, where there are wooden structures. I look up. On top of the structures are these jointed monstrous figures standing, and I realize another piece has just begun. At this moment, a man suddenly makes an announcement, "this is a piece by Shi Qing." ----the monstrous figures turn out to be two people wearing special leopard body-suits with their faces all puffed up with make-up. Their ears are sticking up from their heads and their buttocks are linked together, making them appear as a two-headed monster. There are two of them, one standing still on top of the wooden structure, the another on top of the wooden structure holding a steaming pan. Twisted up to the coarse surface of the legs of the wooden frames are snake-shaped aluminum ventilation pipes. The other one of two-headed monsters is lying on his stomach on the ground crawling around the wooden structure. He holds a clay figurine in his hand. Behind him is a girl with her hair all disheveled, crawling like a cat from time to time, with a bright lit flashlight blocking her mouth. She is also holding a small two-headed clay figure in her hand. As we look above, a video is being projected upon a small piece of glass. The image is blurry, and on the blurry image we find the views of the daily lives of these two two-headed monsters: on a subway, being driven out from a restaurant...on a street.... As we look down, we find that woman with disheveled hair with a table knife, chopping into the bloody footprints left by the two-headed monsters with a dull expressionless face. All of a sudden, the light turns red. The woman walks up to the space between the two wooden structures. She takes a table knife and cuts out the thin membrane covering up the private parts of the two-headed monsters. Small grains of rice begin to patter down on the bodies of the monsters.....the light turns into gloomy blue. As she chases up the two-headed monsters with armful of searchlights, one by one, the monsters dive into a pan filled with Chinese medicine.

Witness: ---- Some leaflets are falling down from the dark ceiling, one by one. I catch one of them, printed on them are the lines from personal ads on the internet: the one inside my hand reads lines by a lesbian woman looking for a partner, with her phone number and e-mail address. As I look away from the leaflet in my hand, I hear the crashing noise of a gong. I turn my head only to realize that the performance on the spring mattress in the middle of the space has already started for a little while. Above, a beautiful young girl is sitting on a swing, swaying to and fro in the air. With a mirror and a lipstick in her hand, she puts on make-up with a self-pitying expression. Above the swing is where the gong is hung. A young stud with long hair is jumping over and over on the mattress strenuously to hit the gong. He has to jump so that he does not disturb the swaying rhythm of the swing. Striving to take a breath, he looks exhausted. Under his feet are the tomatoes being mashed away, with its juice spattering onto his body. The sound of the gong intensifies in the darkness of the ceiling, and the leaflets keep falling down upon us, one by one.

Witness: The gong suddenly stops ringing, and the boy falls exhausted on to the mound of mashed tomatoes. The girl on the swing also loses her balance, falling on the ground. Before I realize what is happening, the sight of abandoned ropes of the swing shaking to and fro enters my eyes. Two hired-laborer looking men are climbing down the frame. As soon as they hit the ground, they walk up to the wall at the front to take the paper screen, which has been resting against the wall, and they carry it to the center of the room. Once they reach the center, they completely cease to move. The whole room is in commotion, everyone knows something is definitely about to happen. We all wait ----- the atmosphere intensifies as we keep waiting.

Witness: The paper screen is finally lit from behind with someone's shadow cast upon its surface. Those workers (who just climbed down to carry the screen) begin to grab things and smash them toward the shadow. Immediately, the shadow responds by taking evasive, nervous movements ---- jumping and moving according to his premonition, dodging from attacks which could come any time from unknown directions.

From time to time, running around with his head covered with both hands, the person behind the screen moves sensitively. But his effort is to no avail, because the number of people throwing things at him have grown too many, everyone in the audience has began to take a part. The surface of the paper is now thickly dotted with holes and ripping patterns, it will soon be all ripped apart. The shadowed figure realizes there is no way to out and simply seizes his movement. He squats at a corner with his head covered with hands, no matter how many things continue to fall upon his body. The crowds of attackers suddenly calm down a little bit, the hurling rhythm slows down. I cry out: "Attack! This is art!" With my call, all kinds of things once again mercilessly are thrown upon the shadow. Gradually, the shadow seems to have surpassed his initial scare, and seems indignant. He stands up and crosses over to our side through an opening between the screens. Who would had thought this was Qiu Zhijie? He seems calm, and he looks directly at the audience with a tense stare. There are many hands with objects still held inside tightly remaining frozen in the air, defining an awkward moment. Confronted by the eyes of the victim, guilty consciousness wells up in the minds of attackers.

Witness: ----After both parties reach a deadlock for a while, Qiu Zhijie finally steps out from behind the screen, and walks up to the opposite wall as he divides the crowds in two. On the ground is a fallen statue of a sitting Buddha, and inside his sermonizing palm rests a glass of water. The scroll on the wall above it reads: "Buddha sees 84000 creatures in one drop of water." Qiu Zhijie walks up to the front of the statue. He pulls out a tube and inserts its one end into the glass of water while putting the other end to his mouth. He sucks the water until it is gone to the last drip. He then squats down himself to help bring up the Buddha. The glass is now brought up horizontally, but to our surprise, it does not fall off --- as if the bottom of the glass has gotten stuck to the Buddha's palm. The light extinguishes in the space, only leaving the light coming in from a small room at the southeast corner, the crowds of people surge towards that direction....

Witness: I see a small room. The whole wall connecting the room to a bigger room is a sheet of glass. In the space behind the glass wall are more than ten people who look like hired laborers, including both male and female. Each one of them is holding and breathing into a tube that is connected to a huge balloon. Slowly the balloon expands, quickly burying the lower bodies of the laborers under its efficacy. On top of a flight of stairs outside the room, that couplets of real and fake heads have appeared once again, still being reliant on each other. Inside the mouths of the real man he holds one of those decorative lights you see in small shops. The flickering motion of the string of lights communicates a sense of mobility to us. It looks as if the lights are all flowing into his mouth. The string of lights also lie on the ground in front of the glass wall. Inside, the balloon has grown big enough to cover the heads of the laborers. The air from more than ten people are fused together inside the balloon.

(Another Witness : -----------The above narrative by the witness has a mistake-------when the laborers were sandwiched between the glass wall and the growing balloon, the couplet of fake and real heads has already climbed down a flight of steps and circled around the space and they have also projected images through the glass wall into the balloon: an image of them taking shots of each other, as well as live images of people surrounding them.)

Witness: The paper lanterns are still rotating, other lights are successively turned on, the whole room is now lit so bright like a daytime. Two people in raincoats have appeared on top of the steel cage. Between the two cages is the pig and white feathered chickens. The black cloth covering the two cages is taken off, exposing two black Tibetan mastiffs. Its hard to believe that they have stayed inside the cage for so long without barking once. These two dogs, the most violent dogs on the world, seem disoriented in the precarious atmosphere. I hear motor sounds around my eyes. I look up to find a man and a woman in raincoats above the cages holding electronic chain saws in their hands. Once they pull the cord, motors roar, the chain saws begin to vibrate fiercely. They raise the chain saws to cut through the pig's flesh, cutting it horizontally and then diagonally. The pigs body is soon split open. Under the huge impact of the chain saw, bits of pig flesh splashed all over, covering the people in raincoats. To escape from being hit by the splashing meat, the audience scatters away. Together with the attached live chickens, the cut-out pieces of pig meat fall down on the floor. Two people squat on the floor to cut the pieces even further to feed them to the mastiffs. Yet the dogs do not seem to show any interest. By now the pig's body has already been cut into two with the remnants of its legs swaying in the air. Suddenly one tomato is thrown from the crowd, smashing onto the performer's body. It seems that someone cannot stand the scene and has begun to express his anger. The same person grabs the piece of meat from his body and also from around his feet area to throw, turning the scene into an uproar. The powerful music and the motor sound fuse together, and suddenly a red box opens up. From inside, countless numbers of white mice crawl and run out in all directions. The bystanders scream and scatter, the music comes to a halt.

Witness: Up above the crowd the paper lanterns are still revolving around and around. The pigs legs which were swaying in the space between the two lanterns which say, "Ha Ha Ha" and "Tan" (to sigh), "Chang" (to sing), "Ku" (to cry), have ceased to move. The site of the Spree has already turned into a ruin. As I walked out together with the flow of other people, I passed by that table covered with meat products, I picked up a few pieces of ham to eat. After the Spree , I no longer feel awkward in doing so. I wonder who cleans up the mess after the Spree .

Translation by Lisa Horikawa