It Rhymes With Transgression

At the beginning of this year, the Songzhuang Art Museum of Beijing announced plans to host "An Exposition of Chinese Performance Art," a first-of-a-kind exhibition for the center.

As its name suggests, the Songzhuang Art Museum ("zhuang" means village) is a small museum built to rural scale. Songzhuang's museum is strange for its existence at all in China, where most provinces and autonomous cities, including Beijing, don't have their own art museums. The trend-setting facility is curated by well-known art critic and planner Li Xianting.

("Adding a Meter to a Nameless Hill," a seminal 1995 performance art piece by Zhang Heng and Zuoxiao Zuzhou)

Li, known by many in the Chinese arts community as the "Godfather," has an extensive personal network. He possesses an unrivaled reputation among the four to five thousand artists living in Songzhuang. In fact, the achievements of Songzhuang's fixed development model are entirely attributable to Li and his lifelong devotion to writing. The extraordinary Songzhuang exhibit can be called his brainchild.