Art as Surgery: Hygiene Politics in Zhang Peili’s Glove Art, 1985–91

Abstract

This article analyzes Chinese video artist Zhang Peili’s latex-glove-themed paintings and conceptual art from the 1980s. It argues that they are an important intervention into post-socialist China’s politicized discussions on art’s role in society. Building on Mel Chen’s discussion of animacy hierarchies as sociopolitical constructs, the article reads Zhang’s latex gloves as animate—transgressing boundaries of “aliveness” between humans and objects. It locates Zhang and his art collective, “Pond” Society, amid mid-1980s discourses on art’s emotional contagiousness, highlighting that the Chinese art establishment’s insistence on Realism and on the Maoist art methodology of “immersion into life” (shenru shenghuo) reflected anxieties about “healthy” art making that could promote national progress. Zhang’s series of X? glove paintings from 1986 onward represent strategic promotions of his medical conceptualization of art. Zhang was infected during the 1988 Shanghai hepatitis A epidemic, and his subsequent glove-themed work called for an embrace of viral life. The figure of the glove was also central to Zhang’s first two video works, including Document on Hygiene No. 3, which signals a shift away from the insistence that art should reinforce the artist’s authority. Instead, Document uses the gloved hand to reflect on where, in a society obsessed with purity and in an art world obsessed with radicalism, we might fundamentally locate agency. This article shows that the history of contemporary Chinese art cannot be understood without considering artists’ responses to, and contributions in shaping, the deeply politicized notion of hygiene.