ALL FOR SALE

By GU ZHENQING 

For more than a century, the transformation of China from agricultural society to modern industrial and commercial society has been a quite difficult process, back and forward, likewise turning paths, bending hills, or winding streams. Over the past three decades, the transformation of society has accelerated on an abrupt and materialistic expressway. Under the lead of market economy and consumerism, the tremendous changes of the values of today Chinese society has shocked and lashed not only cultural tradition, ethics, morals and behavioral norms, but also human nature.

In 1994, Zhu Fadong made the performance PERSON FOR SALE, PRICE ON REQUEST. Wearing the blue worker uniform with the label PERSON FOR SALE on the back, he put flash mobs into practice for a year in the street of Beijing and other cities, as a kind of social interference. Those absurd performances had the metaphorical atmosphere of social prediction and symbolism at that time. However, a decade later, under the ever-increasing pressure for the survival of the mass, the desperation for human individual identity and value produced a common psychological crisis. Obviously, the individual dealing with selling and pricing oneself has evolved to collective hysteria, which could be a general perspective of Chinese society.

Currently, the storm of real estate property syndrome and asset bubble has stimulated the increasing materialism in the highly commercialized Chinese society. However, in the society influenced by the globalization, it seems rational even to sell the moon. ALL FOR SALE has exposed the slant and disorder of human social values as a prevalent slogan.

Is anyone hurt by those words ALL FOR SALE?

In the artist's critical perspective, the conclusion ALL FOR SALE is undoubtedly ironical. There is no doubt that the judgment of ALL FOR SALE is a scalpel in the artist's hands, which will rip off the skin, and present all types of diseases in the commercial society.