In the work Dance! Dance! Bruce Ling! Yao Qingmei, dressed in Bruce Lee’s classic yellow jumpsuit from his final film Game of Death, executes a series of highly symbolic dance moves against a painted bamboo backdrop, whilst holding a hammer and sickle and “howling” along to a piano accompaniment. The piece ends with the artist destroying a tripod. Within the work the artist marries together both the disciplines of performance art and minimalist theatre, with the “expenditure of the body” and “smashing of the tripod” carrying overtones taken from the field of performance art, and the staging and feeling of separation from the audience drawing more heavily on theatre. The work touches upon the concepts of substitution and appropriation, as can be seen in the imitation of the image of Bruce Lee’s cinematic hero, and the appropriation of the symbology inherent in the imagery of bamboo and the hammer and sickle. This occurs on the auditory level as well, with the artist “singing” Bruce Lee’s classic cinematic battle cry in an almost operatic manner, accompanied by an overly romanticized piano rendition of Rage of the Dragon (taken from the soundtrack of Bruce Lee’s Enter the Dragon).

The actions and movements performed by the artist convey a complex mix of emotions, her body language a richly symbolic mixture of elegance, agony and ferocity. Regarding the transformation of movement, the whole performance occupies a conflicting and ambiguous contextual space. However, the sight of a stony-faced Bruce Ling rigidly prancing about the stage wielding a hammer and sickle is almost enough to make one laugh at the over seriousness of the whole matter.

(Edited by Lijie Wang & Miao Zijin)