The+Artist's+Piss+-+Lee+Ming-sheng

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Title: The Artist’s Piss (as part of “ Lee Ming-Sheng=Art” 1987-89 ) Artist(s): Lee Ming-sheng Date: 1988 Period: Post-Modern Country of Origin: Taiwan Cultural/Ethnic Affiliation: Taiwanese Medium: Performance Dimensions: N/A Museum/Collection: N/A Accession Number: N/A Current Location and Manner of Display: N/A Provenance: (the history of ownership if known) N/A

Photo: Liu Wan-rou

//The Artist’s Piss// is a [|Dada]-ist [|performance art] piece executed in 1988 by inter-disciplinary artist [|Lee Ming-sheng]on the grounds of the[| Taipei Fine Arts Museum] (TFAM). The piece was one act of a larger performance piece entitled: //Lee Ming-Sheng=Art//. There were seven acts total in the larger performance that occurred at different locations in Taipei, Taiwan starting in July of 1987 and continuing until the summer of 1988. The Artist’s Piss was the first of two performance pieces by Lee Ming-sheng that coincided with the international //World of Dada// exhibit at TFAM in 1988. The second piece, //The Artist’s Shit//, was the last performance in //Lee Ming-Sheng=Art//, for which Lee Ming-sheng received a beating at the hands of TFAM security officers.
 * Introduction **

Lee Ming-sheng was born in Meinung, Kaohsiung, Taiwan in 1952. Before shifting his focus to being an artist in the 1970s, he studied at, and graduated from, the Department of Navigation Science of the [|National Maritime University] in Taiwan. Lee Ming-sheng was at one time married to Taiwanese artist [|Wu Mali], who published a book on Dada at the time of the //Lee Ming-Sheng=Art// performances.




 * Descriptive Analysis **

The only material utilized during the performance was several ounces of Lee Ming-sheng’s urine. The urine was spilled by Lee onto the floor of the TFAM in front of a didactic wall panel describing the meaning of Dada. The performance was perhaps timed to coincide with a photo-op press conference being held next to [|Marcel Duchamp’s] seminal work //[|Fountain]//, a repurposed urinal, by Taipei city mayor Hsieh within the //World of Dada// exhibit at TFAM. Lee was promptly ejected from TFAM and the small, perhaps one foot square, puddle of the artist’s urine was immediately cleaned up. The entire performance lasted only several minutes and the only known existing documentation is a photograph of the puddle and three exhibition attendees taken by Liu Wan-rou.


 * Formal and Contextual Analysis **

Because of its highly conceptual nature, societal context is of fundamental importance in the discussion and understanding of Dadaist works such as //The// //Artist’s Piss//. At the time of the performance, the arts were still, to a large extent, under the control of the Taiwanese government. Since martial law was declared in Taiwan in 1949, until it was lifted in 1987, the ruling [|Kuomintang] (KMT) government dictated which types of art were to be promoted as valid and which were to be condemned as subversive. Government control of the schools and universities in Taiwan insured that art curricula would be in accordance with these guidelines. For four decades, these important decisions dictating the trajectory of Taiwanese art were made by government officials and bureaucrats, none of whom were trained in the arts. The prevailing style favored by the KMT at the time of Lee Ming-sheng’s performance of //The Artist’s Piss// was highly conservative ink on paper painting that bore an intentional likeness to paintings of the [|Tang dynasty] of ancient China, regarded by many to be the high point of dynastic Chinese art and culture. Some Taiwanese artists and outside observers saw this preference as nothing more than a self-serving propagandist stance on the part of the KMT. It was, as the KMT saw it, an attempt to promote Taipei as the true ethnic, cultural, and more importantly, political capital of China as was recognized by the United Nations until its ouster in 1971. The creation of the TFAM, which opened in 1983 as one of the first contemporary art museums in Asia, was an effort on the part of the KMT to present Taiwan as a modern and internationally art savvy culture following the loss of its UN seat to Beijing. This sudden refocusing of aesthetic by the KMT from a very ancient Chinese art form to a preference for contemporary western art would be seen as opportunistic and thinly veiled pandering to the international art community by avant-garde artists such as Lee Ming-sheng. The first of many great ironies that surrounded the creation of TFAM was that at the time of its opening, the KMT did not own a single piece of modern, post-modern or contemporary art to hang in the massive newly constructed galleries. The second great irony was the museum was staffed by government officials appointed by the KMT who had not been trained in the arts or arts management. Third, The TFAM ignored many active native Taiwanese artists in favor of displaying contemporary Chinese and western art. The TFAM would eventually become a place for native Taiwanese to display their art, however, the more challenging and avant-garde works were relegated to the basement galleries. Controversy surrounding the museum would often garner greater attention than the art inside its galleries. On one occasion the museum director destroyed an artwork that she deemed unworthy of display. At the time of Lee Ming-sheng’s performance, the relationship between many Taiwanese artists and the museum was highly antagonistic. To Lee Ming-sheng, the idea that TFAM would display Dada works, which often function as highly anti-establishment critiques, in order to give an artistically devoid totalitarian government international artistic credibility, was an irony that contradicted the fundamental philosophy of Dada. Dada was not created for this purpose, in fact, Dada was intended to remove credibility from institutional establishments, Duchamp's Fountain being perhaps the greatest icon of this philosophy. Of equal importance in this discussion is of course an investigation into the basic philosophies of Dada. Begun primarily as a literary and theatrical movement during World War I at a small night club theater named [|Cabaret Voltaire] in Zürich, Switzerland, Dada was a vehicle for cultural critique via a deeply nihilistic approach to the arts. Many of its practitioners were driven by the need to expose what they saw as the rampant corruption of governments and bourgeois society that led directly to the atrocities of WWI. Dada is intentionally absurdist, acerbic, and sardonic art, literature, poetry, and theatrical performance directed at the elites of society and its ruling powers utilizing a highly confrontational manner of delivery. Dada can also be seen as a reclamation of the arts from the highly controlled and intensely conservative European art academies of the period by disenfranchised artists. Dada, as a group, did not attract many artists during its short life, however, it became one of the most influential art movements of the 20th century. In 2004, Duchamp's //Fountain// was voted to be the most influential modern art work of all time in a survey of 500 art experts conducted by the organizers of the [|Turner prize] [|1]. The Dada movement would serve as the catalyst for movements such a [|Surrealism], and would be revived several times over the course of the 20th century and into the 21st. During one such Dada revival period in the 1960s, Italian artist, [|Piero Manzoni,] created a work entitled //Artist's Shit,// which Lee Ming-sheng was undoubtedly referencing in the last two performance pieces of //Lee Ming-Sheng=Art//.


 * References**.

1 http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/entertainment/4059997.stm