For centuries, the Greek ideal of the human body has emphasized harmony, proportion, and divine perfection, embodying a universal aesthetic of beauty. However, contemporary Chinese artists reject this classical standard, instead using the body as a site of resistance, endurance, and censorship. Their work challenges both state control and cultural traditions, portraying the body not as an object of admiration but as a contested space, filled with historical trauma, suffering, and defiance.
This shift can be understood through Li Zehou’s theory of aesthetic sedimentation (积沉) – which suggests that art carries accumulated historical and cultural meanings – and Bryan Turner’s concept of the “disciplined body”, which explores how institutions regulate and constrain bodily expression. Turner’s ideas build on Michel Foucault’s theory of biopolitics, which argues that modern power structures do not rely on force alone but instead shape individuals through laws, medical discourse, and social norms, making them self-regulating.
These ideas illuminate how Ren Hang, He Chengyao, and Zhang Huan dismantle the classical notion of bodily perfection, instead presenting the body as a medium of personal struggle and political critique.
Instead of sculpting idealized forms, Ren Hang disrupts bodily representation to challenge censorship, He Chengyao ritualizes exposure to confront historical trauma, and Zhang Huan tests the limits of endurance, transforming suffering into artistic expression. Together, their work redefines the contemporary body – not as an idealized form but as an archive of pain, history, and resistance.
I. Ren Hang – The Erotic, Censored, and Fragmented Body
Where Greek sculptors sought perfection and balance in the human form, Ren Hang distorts and fragments the body, creating surreal images that directly challenge state-imposed censorship in China. His erotic, dreamlike compositions position the body as a site of rebellion, disrupting the state’s attempt to regulate both physical and sexual expression.
Ren Hang’s “Untitled” series presents nude figures intertwined with each other. His subjects are often cropped and rearranged to create unnatural poses. The body is no longer a cohesive whole, but rather a fragmented, hyperreal construct. As Bryan Turner argues: bodies are disciplined through institutional norms that shape how they are perceived and represented in society. Ren Hang’s work resists such institutional control, using fragmentation to deny the state’s ability to regulate bodily perception.
Regularly censored in China for being deemed “vulgar” or “obscene,” Ren Hang’s work epitomizes Liu Xiaobo’s assertion that “freedom of expression is the foundation of human rights.” Despite state suppression, his art transforms the body from a passive subject into a tool of defiance, resisting institutional control through surreal fragmentation and erotic provocation. His photographs illustrate how contemporary Chinese artists reject ideals of proportion and perfection, instead embracing bodily disruption as a tool of resistance.
This rejection of bodily unity and wholeness extends beyond political defiance; it also reflects a broader challenge to fixed identity, particularly in the context of queer existence. As a gay artist working under a regime that heavily policies both sexual expression and LGBTQ+ visibility, Ren Hang’s work becomes an act of defiance against heteronormative state control. His portraits often feature nude male bodies intertwined in playful, intimate, and explicitly homoerotic compositions; images that stand in stark opposition to the state’s efforts to suppress LGBTQ+ representation in media and art. In this sense, the fragmentation in his photography is not only a visual rebellion but also a metaphor for the fractured, unstable position of queer identity within an authoritarian society.
Postmodernism, which challenges fixed structures of identity and meaning, aligns with Ren Hang’s deconstructed bodily representation in opposition to both political censorship and aesthetic tradition. His work reflects postmodern critiques of stable subjecthood, illustrating the dissolution of fixed identity in an era of hyper-surveillance and media regulation. By distorting and reassembling the human form, Ren Hang challenges not just political censorship but also the rigid categorizations of gender and sexuality, presenting the body as fluid, uncontainable, and resistant to imposed structures.
While Ren Hang weaponizes eroticism against censorship, He Chengyao takes a different approach. She uses the body as a site of intergenerational trauma, confronting both personal and collective suffering through ritualized performance.
II. He Chengyao – Trauma & The Ritualized Female Body
If Ren Hang’s photography fights external censorship, He Chengyao’s performance art reveals internalized oppression. The cultural and historical weight of trauma inscribed onto the female body. By engaging in ritualized bodily exposure, she confronts both societal shame and personal memory, rejecting traditional ideals of bodily restraint in Chinese aesthetics. Unlike the Greek classical ideal, which celebrates the controlled and perfected body as a reflection of divine and intellectual harmony, He Chengyao’s work instead embraces bodily vulnerability and raw exposure as a means of reclaiming agency. In contrast to the idealized, muscular physiques of Greek sculptures – where the human form is presented in an ideal state of balance – traditional Chinese artistic representations of the body have historically emphasized restraint and symbolic meaning over physical perfection. He Chengyao’s radical exposure disrupts both traditions, rejecting the controlled aesthetics of Greek sculpture and the symbolic restraint of Chinese classical art to assert the female body as a lived, vulnerable, and politically charged entity.
One of her most famous works, “Opening the Great Wall” (2001), involved walking topless along the Great Wall. This act directly defied societal expectations of female modesty, reclaiming the body from both Confucian traditions and Communist-era restrictions on individual expression. Li Zehou’s concept of sedimentation applies here, as He’s exposure is not merely personal but historical. Her mother, a victim of the Cultural Revolution, was found walking the streets undressed due to psychological distress ,which resulted in institutionalisation for her supposed mental illness. In He’s work, the body becomes an inherited site of suffering, much like Li’s theory that art carries the weight of accumulated history.
In 99 Needles, He Chengyao inserted 99 acupuncture needles into her body, reenacting a traumatic memory of her mother’s forced acupuncture treatment for mental illness. As a child, He witnessed her mother’s agony, unable to intervene. This performance became an act of both remembrance and atonement. An attempt to bear the pain her mother endured and reclaim agency over suffering.
Li Zehou’s aesthetic sedimentation (积淀) explains how historical trauma accumulates within cultural expression. He’s body, pierced and reddened, becomes an archive of pain, where personal and generational suffering manifest physically. Bryan Turner’s disciplined body further contextualizes this: her endurance reflects how bodies, particularly female bodies, are subjected to cultural and medical control.
“99 Needles” transforms the artist’s pain into a ritual of resilience. In reliving her mother’s suffering, He Chengyao challenges the imposed silences of shame and institutional violence, making trauma visible and undeniable.
If He Chengyao externalizes trauma through self-exposure, Zhang Huan pushes bodily endurance to its limits, transforming suffering itself into an artistic language.
III. Zhang Huan – The Enduring & Suffering Body
Zhang Huan pushes his body to the extremes, using endurance and suffering to critique both social neglect and the limits of human resilience. Unlike Greek statues that celebrate ideal proportions, Zhang presents the body as a vulnerable, decaying entity, subjected to time, pain, and institutional disregard.
His performance “12 Square Meters” (1994) was a direct confrontation with bodily endurance and the conditions of social neglect. In a small, filthy public toilet, Zhang sat naked, covered in fish oil and honey, allowing flies and insects to swarm his body. He remained motionless for an hour before walking to a nearby pond to cleanse himself. This brutal endurance test reflected not only the unhygienic conditions of many public facilities in China but also the resilience required to exist in such an environment.
Turner’s claims that power operates through the body, disciplining and subjecting it to social and political control. “12 Square Meters” embodies this struggle. Zhang’s body becomes both a site of decay and resistance, absorbing suffering yet refusing to break. His work, rooted in personal memory, critiques how poverty, neglect, and state control shape lived experiences, turning endurance into an act of defiance.
Zhang Huan’s My New York (2002) explores identity, survival, and human duality. Performed at the Whitney Biennial, Zhang arrived concealed under a white cloth on a palanquin. When unveiled, his body – covered in raw meat – appeared grotesque and exaggerated, evoking strength and savagery. He walked through the crowd, distributing white doves, which were released before he returned to the museum.
The performance symbolizes the tension between aggression and transcendence. The raw meat represents the animalistic instincts humans adapt to survive: competition, ambition, and power. The doves, rooted in Buddhist tradition, signify the possibility of liberation from these base impulses.
Li Zehou’s “aesthetic sedimentation” (积淀) helps explain Zhang’s layering of cultural meaning, merging Buddhist philosophy with Western individualism. Bryan Turner’s “The Body and Society” argues that modern social life disciplines the body through structured routines that both empower and constrain. Zhang’s performance visualizes this struggle. His meat-covered body embodies how immigrants must adapt, often adopting an exaggerated identity to navigate new societal structures. Meanwhile, Liu Xiaobo’s ideas on freedom resonate in the contrast between the raw flesh that binds and the doves that symbolize release.
Through “My New York”, Zhang critiques civilization’s hypocrisy: while society values kindness, it rewards ruthless ambition. The performance forces the viewer to confront their own nature: are we bound by instinct, or can we choose transcendence?
By turning suffering and pain into performance, Zhang Huan rejects the idea of beauty altogether. For him, the body is not divine, but suffering; not harmonious, but vulnerable; not timeless, but decaying.
Conclusion
Where Greek art idealized the body as a symbol of balance, divine perfection, and intellectual harmony, traditional Chinese aesthetics emphasized restraint, symbolism, and spiritual transcendence over physical form. Contemporary Chinese artists such as Ren Hang, He Chengyao, and Zhang Huan reject both traditions, redefining the body as a site of resistance, endurance, and historical weight.
Instead of sculpting perfected figures or concealing bodily imperfection, these artists expose fragmentation, trauma, and suffering. Ren Hang’s disjointed, homoerotic compositions challenge both state censorship and the classical emphasis on bodily symmetry. He Chengyao’s ritualized performances subvert the traditional Chinese preference for bodily modesty, reclaiming exposure as an act of defiance. Zhang Huan, rather than presenting an idealized or restrained form, pushes the body to its limits, transforming pain into a visceral, political statement.
In rejecting both the Greek ideal and the classical Chinese restraint, their work suggests a new vision of the body. One that is neither perfected nor hidden, but raw, vulnerable, and deeply human. Through their radical reimaginings, they redefine bodily representation in contemporary Chinese art, revealing it as an evolving archive of struggle, resistance, and transformation.
