A story in today’s China Daily takes up the question of the use of the naked human body in performance art.  It is an earnest piece, dutifully interviewing the theory-laden practitioners of performance as well as the mildly outraged establishment critics.  All the usual notes are sounded: performance art is another facet of China’s modernization; it is a "Western import" and, therefore, should be adapted to Chinese circumstances; etc.  But performance nudity is the crux of the matter.  As one critic opines:

I think university students must first be rational while not controlled by their instinctive desire. They must not be led by their adventurous impulse or a sense of wild abandonment. Can a simple performance…really save the 41 naked young men and young women from self-indulgence?

     This brought Chuang Tzu to mind and, I think, he would probably disagree with the above statement, at least in part, and be more open to the possibility of a performance art that allowed for the expression of the spontaneous and natural.

    Chuang Tzu would agree that self-indulgence is a danger here.  He would also shy away from over-intellectualizing performance and would certainly reject the call to be "rational".  Instead, he would likely advocate expressions that were impulsive and unthinking and immediate.  The title of the first chapter of his book points in this direction: "Wandering Boundless and Free."  And so do passages like this:

We’re cast into this human form, and it’s such happiness.  This human form knows change, but the ten thousand changes are utterly boundless.  Who could calculate  the joys they promise?

And so the sage wanders where nothing is hidden and everything is preserved.  The sage calls dying a blessing and living long a blessing, calls beginnings a blessing and endings a blessing….(87).

     There is certainly no shame in nudity here.  And no shame in ugliness or aging or any other natural human experience – "nothing is hidden."  Quite to the contrary there is joyfulness, maybe even playfulness, in the "ten thousand changes." Is it just me, or is there a script for a performance piece here?