DSL Magazine: Issue 13

28 In the aftermath of the Cold War and the end of the Soviet bloc, Chinese artists drew a historical comparison between the fall of the Berlin Wall, the Iron Curtain, and the presence of the Great Wall of China. Although their purposes were entirely different, the materiality of the wall served as an indicator of claim. In this Zheng Lianjie's 1990 performance The Wall - Commemorate for the German Reunification is striking. The monument was covered with large sheets of paper at strategic locations (tower, ground) that were manually rubbed off to reveal the structure beneath. The surface of the paper becomes the imprint of the wall, symbolizing its presence as well as its evanescence. In 1991, Lin Yilin of the Big Tail Elephant Group portrayed walls as constitutive, removable characters. The ground and the cut stone palisades are framed, arched by metal structures or arranged in cubes. The compact rows of stones do not obstruct the apertures, liberating round trips of the gaze.