Body Narratives and Identity Construction in Asian Performance Art across Cultural Contexts

Abstract

Asian performance art has become increasingly visible in transnational exhibition circuits, yet scholarship on it remains divided between single-artist monographs and region-bound surveys, leaving few instruments for reading such work comparatively across the contexts in which it is received. This article proposes the concept of double legibility: the performing body in cross-cultural circulation must signify at once within a local semiotic economy of ritual, kinship, language and historical memory, and within a transnational curatorial economy that has inherited habits of reading Asian bodies as ethnographic evidence. The body carries inherited material of its own; what the two regimes govern is not whether that material exists but what it is taken to mean. Identity in this situation is produced relationally, in the distance between the two readings. The article develops a three-axis analytical framework of inscription, transmission and negotiation, sets out diagnostic criteria for applying it, and demonstrates the coding procedure on a worked example. It is applied comparatively to four works: Kimsooja’s A Needle Woman, Melati Suryodarmo’s Exergie: Butter Dance, Amanda Heng’s Let’s Walk, and Anida Yoeu Ali’s The Buddhist Bug. The analysis finds that the artists’ most consequential decisions are made on the third axis, where the terms of reception are anticipated rather than accepted. A final section examines what happens to the body narrative once its record enters digital circulation. What the four cases demonstrate and what the framework hypothesises for the wider field are distinguished throughout.