Meiling Cheng

Meiling Cheng is an Earth-based poet, thinker, and theorist interested in using words as a visual-sonic medium. She was a published poet, an award-winning essayist and short-story writer in Taipei, Taiwan, before she moved to the United States to attend Yale University, School of Drama, for her MFA and DFA degrees in Theatre Arts. She is currently teaching at School of Dramatic Arts, University of Southern California. Her first book IN OTHER LOS ANGELESES: MULTICENTRIC PERFORMANCE ART (2002) deals with minoritarian subject formation and the links between visuality and theatricality in live art. Supported by a 2008 Guggenheim Fellowship, her second book BEIJING XINGWEI: CONTEMPORARY CHINESE TIME-BASED ART (2013) probes a variety of transient artworks created in response to China's rapid transformations in its post-Deng period. The book positions those encountering performance and installation via reading and writing in a conceptual dialogue with selected Chinese artists to explore the use and awareness of time in art. With her co-editor Gabrielle Cody and their huge team of authors, Cheng is working on a critical anthology entitled READING CONTEMPORARY PERFORMANCE: THEATRICALITY ACROSS GENRES (2015). With Claudia Bucher and Rolf Hoefer, Meiling Cheng cofounded the Museum of Ommmmm in 2010. The Museum existed for two months and vanished before any cobwebs formed. Undaunted, Cheng tries to practice yoga three times a week--as if it matters.

From cannibalism to light calligraphy, from self-harming to animal sacrifice, from meat entwined with sex toys to a commodity-embedded ice wall, the idiosyncratic output of Chinese time-based art over the past twenty-five years has invigorated contemporary global art movements and conversation. In Beijing Xingwei, Meiling Cheng engages with artworks created to mark China's rapid social, economic, cultural, intellectual, and environmental transformations in the post-Deng era. Beijing Xingwei - itself a critical artwork with text and images unfolding through the author's experiences with the mutable medium - contemplates the conundrum of creating site-specific ephemeral and performance-based artworks for global consumption. Here, Cheng shows us how art can reflect, construct, confound, and enrich us. And at a moment when time is explicitly linked with speed and profit, 'Beijing Xingwei' provides multiple alternative possibilities for how people with imagination can spend, recycle, and invent their own time.