"FEI-YA! FEI-YA!"
Fly! Fly! (Our Chinese Friends)

Video, DVD, 8 min

titled, signed, dated and numbered on DVD

An evening in a bar in Beijing - a group of artists and dancers play a game similar to the European “rock-paper-scissors”. But the Chinese version is more complex. Depending on the result (tie, win or lose), the players accompany their gestures with symbolic kisses or slaps to the opponent's face at breakneck speed. The tumult increases until it explodes in roaring, ecstatic laughter, only to lose intensity and subside again. Then a new couple continues the game.
The video was presented under the pseudonym Ying-bo at the 48^th Venice Biennale in 1999 by curator and exhibition organizer Harald Szeemann (1933-2005). Szeemann was also the artist's partner at the time and only a few weeks after the opening, Lüscher's authorship was announced by the resourceful art critic Karlheinz Schmid in his art information service: “Ingeborg Lüscher wanted the work - and nothing but the work - to be seen, that the connection with Szeemann should not be established once again, as so often in the past ... The secret of this year's Biennale, ultimately not conceived as a secret at all, but only as work protection for the turbulent opening days, can (also) be seen as a response to an art business that is increasingly determined by names and less by works.“¹
(Christoph Fuchs, translated by deepL)

Note

Anmerkung

1
Ingeborg Lüscher, https://ingeborgluescher.com/works/videos/il876 (aufgerufen 11.3.2025)