In 1964, Japanese-American artist Yoko Ono first performed and filmed Cut Piece at Yamaichi Concert Hall in Kyoto, Japan. To mark the opening of Ono’s 2019 exhibition Peace is Power at the Museum of Fine Arts in Leipzig, Germany, Chinese-born artist Xie Rong performed Ono’s Cut Piece. Now regarded as a pioneering work of performance art and conceptual art, Cut Piece has also become an iconic feminist artwork. Unlike the single-channel perspective of Ono’s original film, Xie’s two-channel video offers both an overview of the performance as well as close-ups of Xie. In her performance, Xie, like Ono, makes herself vulnerable as she puts the onus on the audience to dictate how the experience will unfold, ultimately revealing how easily people become complicit in perpetrating acts of violence. This is performance as protest.

📷 Xie Rong performing Cut Piece (for the exhibition Yoko Ono: Peace is Power at the Museum of Fine Arts, Leipzig, Germany), 2019. Photograph by Alexander Schmidt