气候行动组织“Just Stop Oil”的成员在伦敦国家美术馆向文森特·梵高的《向日葵》泼洒番茄汤，使得国家美术馆不再允许观众携带除水及母婴用品之外的液体进入。泼洒的行为展现了一种“为新闻而表演”（performing for the news）的策略，即通过戏剧化的冲突制造公共辩论的空间。
随后，我在国家美术馆内策划了一场参与式行为艺术，成为中央圣马丁艺术学院（Central Saint Martins）与国家美术馆合作项目“Open Frame”的一部分。我最初提出的方案是在美术馆入口处免费向公众提供盛装在印有梵高《向日葵》图案纸杯中的亨氏番茄汤。与原始抗议不同，我试图以一种温和、可分享的方式激活这一事件的余波，并将抗议的破坏性转译为一种可参与、可对话的社会行为。然而，该提案最终被美术馆方面以“场地环境复杂、易引发秩序问题”为由否决，尤其指出特拉法加广场的人流密集与周边流浪人群的不可控性。我被建议转向一个“可控”的替代方案：在美术馆内部（Room 43），使用亨氏番茄汤罐头作为“保龄球”，击倒由纸杯搭建的塔状装置。这一象征性的替代行为，在制度许可下完成，成为一场安全、规训内的重演。
机构对学生未经许可的行为艺术作出了迅速而正式的反应。我收到了一封官方来自学校的警告邮件，被告知“作为我们的学生，你不应该做这种事情”。随后在学校的约谈中，课程主任指出：“But you're a student. Yeah. You're not a professional artist yet.”（“但你是学⽣。你不是职业艺术家。”）
Members of the climate activism group Just Stop Oil splashed tomato soup onto Vincent van Gogh’s Sunflowers at the National Gallery in London, prompting the institution to prohibit visitors from bringing liquids other than water or necessary baby supplies into the gallery. This action exemplified a strategy of "performing for the news," employing theatrical confrontation to create spaces for public debate.
Subsequently, I curated a participatory performance within the National Gallery as part of the "Open Frame" collaboration between Central Saint Martins and the National Gallery. My initial proposal involved distributing Heinz tomato soup to the public free of charge at the museum’s entrance, using paper cups printed with Van Gogh’s Sunflowers. Diverging from the original protest, my intention was to gently and communally activate the aftermath of the event, translating the destructive act of protest into a participatory, dialogical social gesture. However, the museum rejected this proposal, citing "complex site conditions and potential disruptions to public order," specifically noting the densely populated Trafalgar Square and unpredictable presence of homeless individuals nearby. Instead, I was advised to pursue a more "manageable" alternative: inside Room 43 of the museum, using Heinz tomato soup cans as "bowling balls" to topple towers constructed from paper cups. This symbolic replacement action, authorized by the institution, became a safe, disciplined re-enactment.
Nevertheless, after executing this approved indoor performance on April 25, 2025, I remained committed to my original concept. Unauthorized, I distributed tomato soup in paper cups to the public entering the gallery outside Trafalgar Square, transforming the destructive element of the tomato soup into a medium for hospitality and dialogue.
The institution swiftly and formally responded to this unauthorized student performance art. I received an official warning from the school via email, stating explicitly, "as our student, you should not engage in such behavior." During a subsequent meeting at the university, the program director remarked, "But you're a student. Yeah. You're not a professional artist yet."
In response to the institutional meeting, I strategically invoked historical examples from art history to contextualize and justify my action, intentionally adopting the persona of an academic pedant as a means of resisting institutional pressure. I drew connections to several art-historical precedents, including John Latham, who in 1966—while teaching at Saint Martins, my current institution—encouraged students during a seminar to chew and ferment a book borrowed from the school’s library, and was subsequently arrested by police while drawing a line in public space outside the Serpentine Gallery. Although these unconventional actions led to Latham losing his teaching position at Saint Martins, his "chewed book" was eventually collected by MoMA. This shift from punitive response to institutional recognition underscores the historical paradox of art institutions concerning transgressive behaviors. Additionally, I referenced Mierle Laderman Ukeles' repeated act of washing the steps of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and Andrea Fraser’s portrayal of a fictitious museum docent.
Through these references, I aimed to position my tomato soup distribution within the lineage of institutional critique. While this act of contextualizing myself was not initially planned, it emerged as a strategic response to institutional scrutiny. By invoking these historical precedents, I sought to steer the conflict and dialogue between myself and the institution into an art-historical discourse. Simultaneously, this process offered an opportunity to critically examine whether the frequent educational method of producing knowledge through "supporting documents"—the reference to historical artists—effectively facilitates genuine dialogue with institutions. Can artistic knowledge itself become a tool for discussing the right to knowledge, and can we indeed employ the critical frameworks learned in art school in authentic engagements with institutional authority?
During the meeting, I secretly recorded the entire conversation using a voice recorder. The recording was later transcribed verbatim, formatted into a script, and exhibited as part of the show. Mounted and displayed in the gallery, it became a "viewable textual record of institutional dialogue," as well as an unplanned institutional theatre performance. The exhibition simultaneously featured two sets of videos: one screen documented the officially sanctioned "symbolic proposal" conducted within the museum, while the other depicted my spontaneous, unauthorized action outside the gallery.
How did you develop a practice around “re-enactment” as a methodology—one that treats absence as a generative engine for artistic production? And how did this approach shift from re-enacting prehistoric life to re-enacting institutional events?
徐子奕：我所说的“复现”并非“复制/再现”（representation），而是在承认无法还原的前提下，对残片性的证据进行重组与再叙述（re-enactment/relaying）。它更接近 Hal Foster 所说的“档案冲动”、Rebecca Schneider 的“表演的遗存”和 Diana Taylor 的“证词/现场的再激活”——面对不可逆的缺席，不是去填补空白，而是让空白本身成为叙事的驱动力。因此，“复现”并不提供封闭的答案，而是搭建一种可被体验、可被争论的情境。我的创作始终由对“缺失”的敏感推动——尤其是那些无法被直接触及或完整重构的对象。如《化石宴》、《渔获物》，并非为了科学还原古生物的形貌，而是通过味觉、嗅觉、声音等非视觉的感官通道，让观众在身体层面进入与灭绝物种的关系。这类作品承认材料、信息与时间的不可逆断裂，但将这些空白转化为创作引擎，使想象、重组与推测成为作品内在机制的组成部分。在史前自然史的重构之外，我逐渐意识到，这一策略同样适用于制度事件的再演。史前生物的缺席与制度事件的消逝在结构上具有相似性：它们都仅存碎片化的痕迹——档案、媒体报道、制度文件——需要被重新编排与再叙述。《如何将番茄汤带入国家美术馆》就是一次方法迁移的实验，我将“基于缺失进行重组”的策略应用于一个近期但已被制度化叙述框定的抗议事件，关注其制度残留——安检机制、物品禁令、舆论裂痕——这些往往被忽略，却在长期塑造着公众与机构的关系。
When I speak of “re-enactment,” I am not referring to replication or representation, but to a mode of working that acknowledges the impossibility of restoration. It engages with fragmentary evidence through recomposition and re-narration—closer to Hal Foster’s archival impulse, Rebecca Schneider’s notion of performative remains, or Diana Taylor’s reactivation of the live. Confronting disappearance does not mean filling the gaps; rather, the gaps themselves become generative triggers. “Re-enactment,” in this sense, does not offer closure but constructs a situation that can be experienced, debated, and contested.My practice has always been driven by a sensitivity to “absence”—especially to objects and histories that resist direct contact or complete reconstruction. In works such as Fossil Feast and Under the Soil, I was not attempting to scientifically restore extinct species. Instead, I turned to taste, smell, and sound as non-visual sensory channels through which viewers could enter a bodily relationship with vanished lifeforms. These works accept the irreversible rupture of material, temporal, and informational continuity, transforming absence into an engine for speculation, recomposition, and imaginative reconstruction.Beyond the reconstruction of prehistoric natural history, I gradually realized that the same strategy could be applied to the re-articulation of institutional events. The disappearance of prehistoric organisms and the dissipation of institutional incidents share a similar structure: both survive only as fragments—archives, media records, institutional documents—that demand rearrangement and re-narration.How to Bring Tomato Soup into the National Gallery became an experiment in this methodological shift. I applied a “re-enactment through absence” approach to a recent protest action already constrained by institutional framing, focusing instead on its institutional residues: heightened security procedures, liquid-item bans, and polarized public discourse. These residual elements—often overlooked—are precisely what continue to shape the long-term relationship between publics and institutions.The 2022 Just Stop Oil protest—when tomato soup was thrown at Van Gogh’s Sunflowers—was a paradigmatic instance of “performing for the news,” using staged confrontation to generate a space for public debate. In my project, I did not replicate the act of throwing; instead, I shifted its medium and scene from splashing to distribution. Outside the National Gallery, visitors received a cup of Heinz tomato soup served in paper cups printed with Sunflowers. This translation turns a polarizing symbol into one that is shareable, conversational, and co-inhabitable, activating a discussion on institutions, power, and the public sphere through material intervention—soup, cups, and spatial configurations.Whether in the absences of paleontology or the fissures of institutional language, absence itself functions as a form of generative force. Through a chain of “distribution—sharing—dialogue,” I attempt to transform antagonistic events (the splashing and its ensuing security regime) into a site of co-present discourse. And through a “dramaturgy of evidence,” the closed administrative language of my disciplinary meeting becomes a public script—one that can be read, re-performed, and questioned.
Q2: 在收到学校发出的警告邮件后，反应是什么？
What was your reaction when you received the warning email from the school?
When I first received the email, I was genuinely anxious. But the anxiety quickly shifted into a mode of observation: an opportunity to understand how the museum articulates its boundaries, and how those boundaries are produced, justified, and enforced. I began to see the disciplinary process itself as something that needed to be made visible. In a sense, the warning indicated that the “critique” had worked—its very effectiveness was confirmed by the institution’s response.
“Dialogue” unfolded both among the audience and between you and the institution—the former through the distribution of tomato soup, the latter through the unexpected disciplinary process. How do you understand these two different modes of dialogue?
In my initial conception, the “dialogue” I anticipated was entirely oriented toward the public. By distributing and sharing tomato soup, I hoped to shift it from a highly polarized symbol—charged by the 2022 protest—into a shared, ingestible public object. When a visitor takes a cup of soup, they enter not a space where political positions must be declared in advance, but one in which a contentious historical event can be re-spoken through a simple, everyday gesture. This form of dialogue is gentle and participatory; it relies on a chain of distribution–reception–conversation, allowing interpersonal connection to precede ideological stance.However, during the process, an unexpected second mode of “dialogue” emerged—the institution’s formal response. When I enacted the original plan outside the museum, the gesture was interpreted as an overstep, even an “offence,” leading to a warning email and an official meeting. Unlike the informal exchanges in the square, this dialogue was shaped by power: its language institutional, its tempo procedural, its affect cool and mechanical.Rather than exclude this dimension, I decided to integrate it into the work itself—through audio recording, transcription into a script, and parallel presentation with the video installation. During the meeting, it became clear that the institution’s discourse was predicated on my position as a student. I did not want to rely on personal justification alone, so I adopted a strategic approach: redirecting the conversation into an art-historical register, citing canonical examples of institutional critique—John Latham, Mierle Laderman Ukeles, Andrea Fraser—and positioning my gesture within a lineage already validated by the art world.This was, admittedly, performative—almost a deliberate “pedantic” posture. It was both self-defense and an experiment: could the critical frameworks the school teaches actually function within a real institutional confrontation? What happens when one uses the institution’s own epistemic tools to negotiate its boundaries? This became a kind of secondary intervention, transforming an otherwise bureaucratic disciplinary encounter into something that could be recorded, reenacted, and reinterpreted.Throughout this process, I was simultaneously the student being questioned and the artist orchestrating a scene. I was aware that I was performing the role of the “good student,” yet inside that shell was an artistic strategy—using the knowledge sanctioned by the institution to gently test the limits of its authority. This inversion ultimately motivated the transcription of the meeting into a script, extending its performativity and allowing audiences to enter the “second site” of the dialogue, inhabiting the roles embedded within the transcript.
Q4: 请谈谈展览的展成方式，它是如何被构造成一个剧场空间的？
How was the exhibition constructed, and in what sense is it staged as a theatrical space?
徐子奕：在筹备北京展览时，我手中握有大量与事件相关的“证物”——往来邮件、秘密录音、英国国家美术馆的物品限制清单，以及在馆内外的行为影像。最初，我考虑以档案陈列的方式呈现，但很快意识到，这会将它们固定为静态的历史材料，而我希望它们在展览现场中被重新激活，并不断生成新的解读。 因此，我选择将展览构造成一个双重剧场：一边是一比一还原的英国国家美术馆内部场景，另一边是入口外的特拉法加广场。这个空间布置参考了电影美术的场景还原方法，甚至将 Google Map 街景经过 AI 畸变处理后的影像包裹在“广场”的墙面，制造出一种介于真实与模拟之间的感官经验。 地面上铺设了与现场相似的地砖，并用粉笔写下我与老师在约谈中的关键对白，观众可以通过旁边的数字索引，在展厅中找到相应的剧本章节，从而建立起文字、空间和事件之间的关联。两个“场景”中各有一台电视机——美术馆内部的电视播放被机构许可的行为影像，广场的电视播放未经许可的行动。同时，在“广场”区域，我摆放了番茄汤罐头与印有《向日葵》的纸杯，邀请观众现场盛汤、分享，并围绕作品展开即时交流。 在开幕当天，这个剧场空间被进一步激活——我邀请观众随机扮演约谈过程中的三位导师或被约谈的艺术家本人，围绕展厅中悬挂的剧本文本进行现场朗读与角色交换。这不仅是一次重演，更是一种排练式的“剧场练习”（rehearsal practice）：观众在朗读中体验和重构制度话语的节奏、语气与姿态，从而让原本封闭的权力话语成为可被占用、可被重新分配的公共声音。通过这种双重场景与参与机制，展览试图让观众在穿梭、观看、朗读、饮用、交谈的过程中，感知事件如何在现实与再演之间被不断重写和再体验。
When preparing the Beijing exhibition, I found myself holding a substantial body of “evidence” related to the incident—email correspondences, the secret audio recording of my disciplinary meeting, the National Gallery’s restricted-items list, and video footage of the actions inside and outside the museum. Initially, I considered presenting them as a conventional archive, but quickly realized that this would freeze them into static historical documents. What interested me instead was how these materials could be reactivated within the exhibition and continually generate new readings.This led me to construct the exhibition as a double theatre: on one side, a 1:1 reconstruction of the National Gallery’s interior; on the other, the exterior threshold of Trafalgar Square. The installation borrowed methods from film production design, and even incorporated AI-distorted Google Map street views, which were wrapped onto the “square” walls to create an uncanny oscillation between the real and the simulated.The floor was laid with tiles modeled after the original site, and on these surfaces I wrote key lines from the disciplinary meeting in chalk. Each line corresponded to a numbered index that viewers could find in the script displayed nearby, creating a triangulation between text, spatial reconstruction, and the event itself. Each of the two “scenes” contains a monitor: inside the “Gallery,” the screen shows the institutionally sanctioned action; on the “Square,” it shows the unsanctioned performance. In the “square” area, I placed tomato soup cans and Sunflowers-printed paper cups, inviting visitors to serve themselves, drink, share, and use the act of ingestion as a prompt for conversation around the work.During the opening, this theatrical framework was further activated. I invited visitors to randomly assume the roles of the three tutors or the artist subjected to the meeting, reading aloud from the transcribed script and exchanging roles within the reconstructed space. This was not merely a reenactment but a form of rehearsal practice: through voice, pacing, and bodily stance, participants encountered the texture of institutional language and collectively redistributed it. In this sense, institutional discourse—ordinarily sealed inside bureaucratic procedure—became a public text that could be inhabited, questioned, and re-performed.Through this dual scenography and participatory mechanism, the exhibition asks viewers, as they move, watch, read, drink, and converse, to experience how an event is continually rewritten and re-felt in the oscillation between reality and re-enactment.
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与杨紫的对谈 Coversation with Yangzi 主持人: 我们先从你的早期作品聊起。子奕，你最初的实践，比如《化石宴》和《渔获物》，已经展 现出你现在沿用的方法论——通过味觉、嗅觉、声音等多重感官去“复现”那些缺失的事物。 能不能谈谈这种方法是如何逐步形成的?它又如何塑造了你对“缺失”的理解?
Moderator: Let’s begin with your early works. Ziyi, pieces such as Fossil Feast and Under the Soil already reveal the methodology you continue to use today—“re-enacting” what is missing through taste, smell, sound, and other sensory channels. How did this approach develop over time? And how has it shaped your understanding of “absence”?
Xu Ziyi: My practice originally grew out of a childhood habit of collecting. I used to gather shells, insects, fossils, bits of footage, and all kinds of personal archives. But as I accumulated these objects, I kept asking myself: How do I build a deeper, more intimate relationship with them?
My works are therefore structured around what I call “the missing”—objects that are unfinished, marginal, or that fall outside established knowledge systems and resist conventional taxonomies. In Fossil Feast, for instance, I attempted to imagine the taste of extinct species by cooking fossils, using flavour as a conduit to lives that can no longer be accessed. In Under the Soil, I tried to reconstruct the possible sounds of prehistoric creatures, allowing them to “speak” again in the present through vibrations that resonate with viewers’ breath and murmurs.
For me, this sensory displacement is a way of resisting the museum’s impulse to fix, immobilise, or ossify. It is not about scientific reconstruction, but about allowing absence itself to become the engine of narrative.
主持人: 那么，在你现在的展览里，你似乎把这种“复现”的方法从自然史转向了制度事件。比如 2022 年 Just Stop Oil 的抗议，是什么让这个事件吸引了你?
Moderator: In your current exhibition, however, it seems that this method of “re-enactment” has shifted from natural history to institutional events. What drew you to the 2022 Just Stop Oil protest?
当我收到学校与英国国家美术馆合作的邀请时，我并没有立即关注馆藏本身，而是注意到这 个空间的“隐性叙事”——它不只是存放经典绘画的殿堂，也曾经是社会冲突的现场。比如 2022 年 Just Stop Oil 的行动:两位年轻成员将番茄汤泼向梵高的《向日葵》，并喊出“艺术 更重要，还是生命更重要?”这一事件迅速分裂了公众舆论。有人视其为粗暴的破坏，也有人认为这是极具策略性的“performing for the news”，借由冒犯感来获取关注。
Xu Ziyi: For me, “re-enactment” does not apply only to prehistoric life. It can also be used to work through institutional events. The absence of extinct species and the disappearance of institutional actions share a structural similarity: both leave behind only fragments—documents, media reports, procedural traces—that must be reassembled and re-narrated.
When I received the invitation for a collaborative project between my school and the National Gallery, I wasn’t immediately drawn to the collection itself. Instead, I became interested in the space’s latent narratives: the museum is not just a repository for canonical paintings, but also a site of social conflict. The 2022 Just Stop Oil action—two young activists throwing tomato soup at Van Gogh’s Sunflowers while shouting “What is worth more, art or life?”—polarised the public. Some saw it as violent destruction; others viewed it as a highly strategic form of “performing for the news,” using shock to generate debate.
I was drawn to this tense complexity: the protestors were both idealistic (willing to risk arrest) and strategically precise (knowing the painting was protected by glass). Tomato soup had shifted from an everyday substance to a highly charged political medium. I wanted to work with that shift—not by replicating the action, but by re-enacting its afterlives: the heightened security protocols, the new restrictions on liquids, the fractures in public discourse.
My aim was to let audiences confront these “institutional residues” directly, and to transform a symbol of conflict into a medium of sharing and dialogue by distributing soup—so that a violent gesture could be retranslated into a conversational one.
主持人: 杨紫老师怎么看“子奕”提到的一些毁坏的表演。
Moderator: How do you, Yang Zi, view the “destructive performances” Ziyi just mentioned?
Yang Zi: When we speak about “acts of destruction,” I’m immediately reminded of a long arc within the history of religious imagery. In early religious contexts, divinity was conceived as ideal, immaterial, and fundamentally invisible—approached through revelation and affect rather than through any visual form. It was only when religion sought wider dissemination that the divine became gradually visualized; “seeing” began to replace “sensing” as the dominant mode of faith. Iconoclasm, therefore, is never merely the physical destruction of an image. It is not an attempt to return to an original state of invisibility, but rather a symbolic gesture that signals an ideological shift—a dismantling of an established sacred image in order to institute a new order of value.
From this perspective, can the act of throwing tomato soup at Sunflowers be considered a contemporary form of iconoclasm? The answer is far from straightforward. Is such an action questioning the excessive sanctity assigned to art, attempting to desacralize it through desecration? Or is it proposing an alternative “religion”—the urgency of environmental politics—to replace art’s long-standing position at the centre of cultural worship? Actions like these may function simultaneously as dismantling and reconstruction, and their true target is not only the artwork itself but the larger structure of power that art occupies in contemporary society.
When I worked at UCCA, Philip Tinari was preparing a major exhibition on Chinese and American art, which included Huang Yong Ping’s Theater of the World. The work placed snakes, scorpions, spiders, and other creatures together in a single enclosure, staging a visceral metaphor of predation and survival—an allegory of neoliberal competition. When it was shown, it triggered a wave of protests and even death threats, with critics claiming it was cruel and violated ethical norms. This was my first direct confrontation with the intensity of activist groups in the West. Their interventions do not remain within the realm of art criticism; they push art into the battleground of ethics, politics, and social values. At the time, I struggled to understand this—perhaps because I hadn’t lived long within a Western social environment. Only then did I grasp how forcefully activist groups, especially environmental ones, mobilize collectively and with considerable intensity.
So my question to you, Ziyi, is this: How do you understand the motivations of such activists? Do they truly believe that art has become excessively sacralized and therefore must be attacked to demystify it? Are they attempting to construct a new hierarchy of values—placing “environment” above “art”? Or, alternatively, do their actions inadvertently reveal another power dynamic altogether: the use of symbolic destruction as a means of asserting political legitimacy?
Xu Ziyi: I remember that in the same exhibition where Theater of the World was shown, another work was withdrawn as well—Sun Yuan and Peng Yu’s Dogs That Cannot Touch Each Other, which placed a dog on a treadmill in a state of perpetual motion. Seen together, these works generated an intense tension: while exposing structures of power and competition, they simultaneously touched on sensitive ethical and social boundaries.
These controversies made me aware of a broader context: the logic of neoliberalism often drives individuals toward forms of extremity. Lifestyles, beliefs, and value systems increasingly polarize toward what might be called “purity” or “absoluteness.” Consider the Amish communities in the United States, who refuse industrial technologies entirely, maintaining a way of life modeled on pre-modern conditions. From perfectionist subcultures to ascetic religious groups, these phenomena all embody a desire for purity—an impulse that can generate difference and distinctiveness, but also deepen social fractures. This tension, this oscillation between purity and extremity, is something I find deeply compelling.
At the same time, I realized how differently artistic actions are interpreted across contexts. In the UK, institutions like the National Gallery carry substantial public and governmental authority—they function as cultural sanctuaries that can withstand and absorb activist incursions. In China, by contrast, many art institutions are far more fragile; they rely on sponsorship and precarious infrastructures, and cannot easily be seen as stable “carriers of power.” As a result, an act that functions as a challenge to entrenched institutional authority in Britain could, within the Chinese narrative framework, appear instead as a threat to an already vulnerable structure.
This is why, when thinking about the act of throwing soup at Sunflowers, I place it within a much broader discursive system. The gesture is both iconoclastic and symptomatic—revealing the friction between activism and institutional power, but also exposing how society negotiates polarities and conflict. For me, the question is no longer whether an act is “destructive” or “constructive,” but how its meanings transform across contexts, and whether such acts can be retranslated into forms that generate shared space—like distributing soup and inviting conversation.
In this sense, the work is not merely about protest or transgression; it is about how power, culture, and the institution operate differently across societies, and how an artistic gesture can travel between these systems while exposing their internal tensions.
Yang Zi: When we discuss “performances of destruction,” I am often reminded of a larger structural issue. Western art-historical discourse has long been shaped by a persistent centrism: it continuously absorbs non-Western or so-called “primitive” art into its own framework in order to reaffirm its correctness and centrality. This logic is inseparable from postcolonial power relations. Art from Oceania or Africa, for instance, is frequently appropriated as a reference for modernism; the genealogical line from Egypt to Picasso is repeatedly emphasized as the “main” trajectory of art history, while everything outside of it is relegated to the “barbaric” or the “peripheral.” Scholars such as Gombrich dedicated their entire careers to reinforcing this central line.
By contrast, the Chinese narrative operates under a very different structure. China’s cultural formation is grounded in a continental civilization whose inertia favors a top-down mode of power. In this system, whoever holds authority determines meaning and value, and those without power can only attach themselves to that center. This differs fundamentally from the “open” civilizations shaped by maritime expansion and colonial trade, which cultivate a kind of mobile superiority and an “enlightenment-oriented” authority—“I educate you.” In China, authority is more administrative, managerial, and hierarchical.
This is precisely why your work becomes so interesting. As a young Chinese artist intervening in the National Gallery, your action in the UK reads as an institutional provocation or critique—because it confronts a powerful museum with state-backed authority. But if the same gesture were to take place in a Chinese context, it would likely be read very differently, perhaps as “provoking” or “testing” a fragile institution rather than challenging an entrenched power structure. In other words, the meaning of this work transforms fundamentally across contexts: in the West, it raises the question of “who educates whom”; in China, it is more readily interpreted as confronting the core of existing power.
Have you considered how this shift in context reconfigures the meaning of your work?
Xu Ziyi: I find this tension particularly compelling. In the UK, I was summoned for a meeting because of the project—but the nature of that meeting was entirely different from certain cases in China. At the Central Academy of Fine Arts, for instance, Ge Yulu once received a formal administrative notice, and Yang Fudong was likewise issued an official reprimand for his “three months without speaking” work. In those situations, the institution’s response took the form of a unilateral administrative decision—punitive, non-negotiable.
In my case, what I received was not a notice, but an invitation to a “conversation.” A group of department leaders and administrators asked me to attend a meeting. Of course, the conversation included criticism and disciplinary language, but at the same time it opened a space—a framework in which I could attempt to shift the discussion away from moral judgment or the “negative impact” of provocation, and toward an art-historical discourse. I made repeated references to art-historical precedents, asking why provocation recurs throughout art history and why such gestures are necessary within contemporary institutional conditions.
It was not an easy exchange. My language ability limited my articulation, especially when speaking in English within their own discursive terrain. But what mattered was that the mechanism still allowed for a contestable arena. In that moment, the relation between student and institution briefly moved out of pure hierarchy and entered a space where disagreement and argumentation were possible. Such a space is extremely rare within the Chinese institutional framework.
This, to me, is the most revealing aspect of the experience: it lays bare the structural distinctions between the two systems, and it made me more attentive to how the “boundaries of the institution” might themselves be material for artistic investigation.
Yang Zi: After our discussion of “performances of destruction,” I want to return to the particular qualities of your work itself. As I’ve mentioned to you before, my own inclination is to believe that art often needs to carry the imprint of an artist’s singular, irreducible life experience—almost like a personal cipher encoded within the work. But in your practice, I sense a very different logic at play: something closer to a game.
In How to Bring Tomato Soup into the National Gallery, you never confront the institution with a heavy or tragic posture. Instead, you maintain a certain lightness—at times even a sense of play. When the institution asked you to abandon your original proposal, you pivoted to an alternative plan, and even that alternative felt like a game-like reenactment. Later, in the exhibition, you translated the entire incident into a theatrical form—something that resembles a “script-based role-play,” where anyone can enter, take on a part, and inhabit the role of the tutor, the student, or the institution itself.
At that point, the focus shifts entirely. Whether the work originates from some deeply personal, existential intensity becomes much less important. Instead, it operates like an open-ended RPG or an immersive theatre system: participants step into a predefined environment, follow preset lines and limited choices, and begin to experience the institution’s logic from the inside. You seem to anticipate the system’s response—that it will not push you to an emotional breaking point, nor confront you with unbearable tension, but will instead produce a cold, bureaucratic, almost mechanical form of communication. The value of the work, then, lies in offering a framework through which the audience can experience and interpret the institution’s reactions for themselves.
In other words, your work converts personal experience into a structure that is shareable and re-performable. Viewers are no longer mere observers; they can enter the dialogue and conflict through role-play. This “substitutability”—the possibility of stepping into another’s position—may be precisely what distinguishes your work from many practices rooted in autobiographical intensity.
Xu Ziyi: Over the course of this project, I gradually learned to detach myself and approach the situation with a calmer, almost strategic posture. When I first received the warning email—sternly worded and formal—my immediate reaction was anxiety. I had no sense of what the consequences might be: expulsion, disciplinary action, or some other form of institutional punishment. That uncertainty produced a moment of genuine fear. But after the initial panic, I began researching precedents, asking around about how similar cases had been handled. Little by little, I repositioned myself as someone performing a role within an institutional script.
I realised that in this institutional dialogue, everyone is enacting a predetermined part. The tutors must perform the role of the enforcer—upholding policy, maintaining order—even if they privately empathise with the work. I, on the other hand, am required to appear as the student: the one to be disciplined, questioned, corrected. Yet I was also thinking about how to actively rewrite this “script.” During the meeting, I intentionally invoked artists such as John Latham, Mierle Laderman Ukeles, Andrea Fraser, and Mark Wallinger, adopting a deliberately “nerdy,” overly academic stance as a mode of defence. This wasn’t part of the original project; it was a tactical intervention—transforming the history of institutional critique into a temporary shield.
This strategy was both self-protective and experimental. I wanted to test something: when the school constantly instructs us to use “supporting artists” in our writing and coursework as a mode of knowledge production, does that knowledge hold real weight in moments of institutional conflict? Can it actually become a language capable of speaking back to power? As it turned out, once I introduced those references in the administrative meeting, the tone began to shift—the conversation slowly moved away from accusation and toward an art-historical discourse.
This is also why I decided to bring a voice recorder and document the entire meeting. The recording is both evidence and raw material for what I call a “theatre of the institution.” In the exhibition, the transcribed script invites viewers to inhabit the various roles—tutor, student, institution, outsider. For me, this was not simply a form of self-defence; it was a way to let audiences experience how institutional frameworks shape and confine individuals, and to ask: within these structures, what counts as the “authentic self”? And which parts of us are merely positions we are compelled to occupy?
Ultimately, I hope this theatrical mode opens up a more expansive space. Because whether we are students, teachers, or viewers, none of us operate from a single, fixed standpoint—we are all individuals continuously required to perform roles within institutional and social systems. Through reenactment, I want audiences to sense how the institution functions, how it enforces its boundaries, and where its vulnerabilities and fissures lie.
反之，如果并不期待裂缝，而只是接受它始终如常地运转，那么当作品被放入展览语境—— 通过 3D 模拟、舞台化的空间布置与剧本的不断朗读——它是否会再次把观众带入某种“剧场化的监狱”? 也就是说，观众反复进入一个早已被写定的剧本，一个难以突破的循环。在 这样的逻辑里，你为什么要让人产生“空隙并不存在”的感受?这是否意味着，你必须在期待与不期待之间做出选择:要么承认这种空隙的可能性，要么坦然面对它的缺席?
Yang Zi: When we look back at the 2022 tomato-soup incident, its consequences are already known: the activists were arrested, public controversy intensified, and the museum responded by fortifying its institutional boundaries. Given this known outcome, why did you still choose to distribute tomato soup at the National Gallery? What were you hoping for? Were you trying to pry open a fissure—however small—within a seemingly unshakeable system? If so, what does that fissure signify for you? Could it be described, in any concrete sense, as a form of “freedom”?
Conversely, if you were not expecting such a fissure—if you accepted that the system would continue functioning as usual—then when your project enters the exhibition context, through 3D simulations, theatrical spatial constructions, and repeated script readings, does it risk placing the audience back into a kind of “theatrical prison”? In other words, a pre-written script, a cycle that is difficult to break. Under such logic, why create the sensation that “there is no gap at all”? Does this mean you must choose between expecting and not expecting rupture—either acknowledging that such a gap is possible, or fully accepting its absence?
Xu Ziyi: For me, distributing tomato soup was never an attempt to reenact a destructive gesture, but rather to stage an act of giving. I was fully aware that the activists in 2022 were imprisoned for throwing soup, but I wanted to see whether “sharing,” instead of “throwing,” might generate a space of relationality—a form of gentle, reconciliatory empathy among strangers.
Food has appeared repeatedly in my early practice. In Riot Kitchen in Tianmuli, for instance, I noticed how temporary communities formed around cooking and eating—how taste, warmth, and bodily proximity created subtle forms of connection. Tomato soup, in the Western context, is an ordinary, everyday food. It was turned into a political weapon by the activists, but its most fundamental function remains: to be consumed.
So before visitors entered the museum, I wanted them to receive a cup of soup, sip it, talk, hesitate, laugh. The gesture is simple, but it opens a small space of publicness—warm, unthreatening, disarming.
Xu Ziyi: Yes. My initial intention was simply to create a situation in which people might talk to one another over a cup of soup—to translate a historically polarized event into a softer, more sociable encounter. But the institution perceived this gesture as touching a boundary of its authority, and therefore as a form of provocation.
I actually had a faint intuition from the beginning: when visitors held a cup of tomato soup and tried to enter the National Gallery, they would almost certainly be stopped by security. Since the two Just Stop Oil incidents in 2022, the Gallery has significantly tightened its procedures—virtually no liquids are allowed inside. In contrast, Tate, Whitechapel, and most other museums in Britain do not impose such stringent restrictions. At the National Gallery, visitors must queue for a long time before passing through security. To me, the entrance itself had become a site reshaped by the aftershocks of the protest—an institutional landscape sedimented by the event.
Through this small trigger, I hoped to make visible how a single act of protest can continue to reshape institutional boundaries and management logics long after its occurrence. The moment a visitor is stopped, they directly experience how an ordinary object—tomato soup—is transformed into something institutionally uncontainable.
What surprised me was that this gentle, hospitality-based participatory gesture—inviting people to drink soup and talk—was nonetheless read by the National Gallery as an affront. This, in turn, initiated a formal disciplinary process at my school. When I received that sternly worded email, I was indeed anxious at first. But after the initial fear faded, I came to see it as an unusual opportunity: a chance to observe how the institution delineates its boundaries, how these boundaries are shaped by historical incidents, and how they are continually reproduced through administrative language.
Much of the work that followed was precisely about making these mechanisms visible—turning the institution’s boundary-making into something that can be seen, questioned, and thought with.
Yang Zi: I see these two parts as deeply interconnected. At first, when you were distributing tomato soup, the scene you created was one of warmth and shared communion—people connecting through a simple, direct act of drinking together. But as the event unfolded, the mode of communication gradually shifted. What began as an exchange between individuals transformed into a negotiation—almost a collision—between you and the institution. This second form of dialogue was colder, more procedural, and far more bureaucratic than what you originally imagined. It shifted from openness and warmth to a kind of institutional, mechanical communication.
Xu Ziyi: For me, the project began with a kind of post-event curiosity. I initially held a set of “documents” related to the incident—the email requesting my disciplinary meeting, the secret audio recording of that conversation, and the various materials left behind from the actions inside and outside the museum. My earliest thought was simply to present them in an archival form. But as I considered it more deeply, I realized that I wanted to transform these materials into something theatrical—an experience that would allow viewers to enter the situation and sense how both sides inhabit their institutional roles: how much of themselves they reveal, and how much they are compelled to perform the logic assigned to them.
For the Three Shadows version, I deliberately amplified the work’s theatrical and game-like qualities. Working with a film production design team, I rebuilt two spaces at a 1:1 scale: on one side of the gallery, a reconstruction of the National Gallery interior—its wall colors, flooring, and architectural ornamentation; on the other side, Trafalgar Square, with paving stones laid in their actual proportions and walls wrapped in distorted Google Maps street-view imagery. The result is something that resembles reality yet appears unstable because of its distortions—like a temporary stage set.
Inside the “National Gallery,” a monitor plays the institutionally approved indoor action—the “safe” version. I also recreated Van Gogh’s Sunflowers, painting simulated tomato-soup splashes onto the inside of the protective glass. In the “Trafalgar Square” section, another screen plays the unauthorized outdoor footage of distributing soup. Visitors are invited to take the displayed cans and Sunflowers-printed paper cups, serve themselves soup, and begin conversations. On the floor, I chalked fragments of dialogue from the disciplinary meeting—each marked with numerical indices that correspond to the script pages—so visitors can trace the institutional language directly on the ground they walk on.
During the opening, we activated the space further by inviting visitors to perform: anyone could randomly take on the role of one of the three tutors—or me—and read aloud from the script. They drifted freely through the two reconstructed spaces, slipping into roles as they moved. This not only blurred the boundary between artist and audience but also reanimated institutional language as something that could be voiced, questioned, and redistributed. In other words, I hope visitors experience the exhibition as an open theatre—a place where they can drink soup, socialize, perform, and continually reinterpret the event. It becomes a stage on which the meaning of the incident is not fixed but constantly rewritten through participation.
