WORK / LIVE 干活 Wei Chengcheng 魏成成

Wei Chengcheng 魏成成 worked at the Bernard Controls factory in Beijing until 2018. He did not finish elementary school and learned electronics and mechanics in various factories before moving to Beijing with his wife and child. His father was a barefoot doctor in his village, practising both Chinese and Western medicine; his mother was a nurse.

Invited by YAM Yang Art Museum in Beijing in 2017, he conceived a performance built from many elements: his life experience, shamanic ritual and reflections on technology and communication. He had bought a cow’s heart to cook it, but told us he sensed an imbalance of energy in the act and in its purpose. So he decided not to eat it and to perform instead a complex ritual, re-establishing the balance of life energies by transfusing his own blood into the heart.

Beforehand he asked us to place a surveillance camera and a microphone connected to his smartphone inside the heart. After the first part of the performance, in which he was present, he withdrew to a separate room of the museum and went on communicating with the public through the camera and microphone implanted in the cow’s heart.

As the idea unfolded and became real, we saw how, from a sharp connection with his present and past, Chengcheng imagined a sophisticated visual and performative action that belongs both to an authentic ritual practice – he comes from a family lineage of shamans – and to the WORK / LIVE practice of the department, while receiving space and attention from an official art institution.

Before the performance he had already made another work: a wall writing in his own automatic drawing, something he had developed since early childhood to “go inside himself” and “calm down” in stressful or dangerous situations. With Sensitive Heart, Chengcheng showed how he could cultivate his relationship with the department to strengthen his own individuality and use art as a channel of transformation and emancipation.

Contemporary artist, factory worker, shaman and performer, Wei Chengcheng has collaborated with the Social Sensibility R&D Department for over ten years. In 2018 he left Bernard Controls and started his own family business, a take-away restaurant.