Han Bing - 1974 - grew up in an impoverished village in rural China. witnessing the harsh contrast between the urbanized "Chinese dream propelling the nation's struggle to become "modern," and the cruel realities of those left behind" Han Bing's work articulates the struggles and desires in the "theater of modernization." His work is political, but not in the usual sense. 'making love to thirteen shovels for example and 'Forever mating season 'performance ( see below) forces the viewer to " rethink the order of things and the human condition. Han Bing's art manifests a kind of amor mundi—love of the world—investing ordinary objects from everyday life with a subtle sense of the sacred. "
"Han Bing's public performances involve the novel use of ordinary, everyday objects, so close to the daily lives of China's masses that their value is often rendered invisible, in order to stimulate a reconsideration of our relationship to the material world around us, and the meaning of our everyday practices. Evocative of Hannah Arendt's amor mundi—love of the world—his ongoing performance Walking the Cabbage (2000-2005) has become urban legend nationwide, reaching millions of ordinary Chinese who might never set foot in an art gallery. Like the Russian Futurists of the teens and twenties, who used spontaneous performance art in public places to deliver "a slap in the face of the public taste" and force people in society to question their assumptions, Han Bing uses a quintessentially Chinese symbol of home, sustenance, comfort and nurture for poor Chinese—a Chinese boy chok cabbage—to provoke questions about contemporary social values and comment on the ways in which our treatment and use of the objects in our world invests them with their particular, historically situated, socially constructed meanings. " Maya Kóvskaya
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