I don’t know what is more interesting: this description of Zhang Huan’s performance art; or the fact that the Boston Globe story ran in the China Daily.  Here we have an officially sanctioned Chinese newspaper running commentary on postmodern performance art and, simultaneously, telling us that traditional Confucianism is making a comeback (soon to be an Internet movie near you!).  What a wacky world Chinese culture has become!

    Zhang’s latest work is what stands out here (the official "rehabilitation" of Confucius – as if he were another old "Rightist" – is not news and will continue to unfold, ineluctably (as Marxists used to say) for the foreseeable future…).  Zhang was in Boston last week where he enacted his piece "My Boston," which involved a large pile of books and his naked body.  He was creating a reference to political limitations on intellectual life, calling up an image of the terrible first Qin emperor, who burned many, many great works of Chinese thought (virtually wiping out Mohist rationalism).  The location, too, brought to mind the phrase, "Banned in Boston," symbolic of American censorship.  Sounds like it was a challenging evening.

    I can’t help but seen a Chuang Tzu impulse here.  Legalism, of which the Qin emperor was the culmination, is everything Chuang Tzu struggles against; and the persecution of intellectuals and repression of ideas is the most striking point of contrast between Chuang Tzu and the Legalists.  As Burton Watson suggests in his Introduction to his translation of The Complete Works of Chuang Tzu:

The central theme of the Chuang Tzu may be summed up in a single word: freedom. (3)

   The image of a single, naked man, crawling over and around a giant pile of books – volumes stacked as if ready for the torch – strikes me as a fitting image of our continuing struggle against repression, against tyrannical abuses of political power, against the free life of the mind.   And it is especially appropriate this performance be staged by a Chinese man in the United States.  Though censorship is obviously more stringent in China (I wonder if the return of Confucius will be accompanied by an official critique of the first Qin emperor? I doubt it, but that is what a consistent Confucian ethic would require…), we here in the US do experience limitations on free speech (last week was the American Library Association’s "banned books week").  We need to be reminded periodically of the importance of maintaining intellectual liberty, however uncomfortable that may be at times.

   So, thank you Zhang Huan for giving us a Chuang Tzu-like image of freedom.