39 Shing-Kwan Chan Up Against the Wall: Contemporary Chinese Performance Art and the Great Wall If there is a hard, high wall and an egg that breaks against it, no matter how right the wall or how wrong the egg, I will stand on the side of the egg. Why? Because each of us is an egg, a unique soul enclosed in a fragile egg. Each of us is confronting a high wall. The high wall is the system which forces us to do the things we would not ordinarily see fit to do as individuals… We must not let the system control us. –Haruki Murakami 1 O ver the last two decades, the number of walls designed to forcibly mark out and seal borders has almost tripled. From Turkey, to Israel, to Saudi Arabia and America, today at least sixty-five nations have erected walls or fences on their borderlines. Curtailing freedom of movement and self-determination, these obstructive structures have become increasingly prevalent in a world where conflicts and expulsion seem to have substituted benevolence and compassion. Donald Trump’s order of constructing a fortified wall on the US-Mexico border epitomizes the bias and discrimination that have divided and alienated people. Nonetheless, art has the power to challenge, or even subvert, walls and wall-like systems that engender or perpetuate injustice. Throughout history, artists have adopted a wide array of ways to comment, to destabilize, and to enlighten through art. Works of art such as Banksy’s graffiti on the West Bank barrier and mural paintings on the Berlin Wall dynamically combine the creative power of art with the strategic planning of resistance necessary to challenge prevailing social injustice. Following the end of the ten-year Cultural Revolution (1966–76), many performance art works took place on the Great Wall of China—one of the most ancient architectural barriers still standing today. Frequented by local and non-local artists alike, the Great Wall became a popular destination for artists to express themselves through performance, and scholars and art critics have made various attempts to study and interpret these performance works. Most notably, many of them analyse these performance pieces based fundamentally on the artist’s personal agenda. For instance, Wu Hung argues that Zheng Lianjie, with his performance entitled Binding Lost Souls: Huge Explosion (1993), in which the artist adorned tens of thousands of bricks broken off from the Wall with red ribbons, was the artist’s