It is just a folded piece of ordinary blue waterproof cloth -- no pattern, no printing. Nothing really special. Yet, the magic of art appears when 12 people slip underneath the unfolding material... The Blue Cape emerges.

The Cape suddenly looks like a blooming epiphyllum as the people in the blue cloth parading in a phalanx at the Jinshanling section of the Great Wall in northern Beijing, express a desire for peace in this ancient defense fortress that once repelled invasion.

The "flower" is, however, weathered, fading away momentarily when the performers stop moving around.

"It's my ephemeral living monument -- a monument of peace and harmony," says Nicola L, a 65-year-old French artist who masterminded the performance art with the voluntary participation of a dozen Chinese. "What I'm trying to say is that people with different cultures and born in different countries could smoke the calumet together. French or Chinese, we all live on the same blue planet."

Inspiring concept

The French conceptual artist's idea of movement art is way beyond Yu Lichun's comprehension, a 29-year-old vendor on the Great Wall, who visualizes monuments only in tall stone columns or statues -- concrete, visible and unshakable, erected in memory of a great man or event.

"Art? I don't get it," she says of the Cape, stamping her feet on the snow-covered ground as if to chase the cold away. Yet she enjoys the show. "It must be warm inside that huge raincoat," she remarks.

The Cape, which was unveiled on the Great Wall on January 3 was a high note in the chorus of the Year of French Culture, which started in October 2004 through July 2005, to celebrate the 40th anniversary of the establishment of the Chinese-French diplomatic relations.

Amused by Yu's remarks, Ling Fei, chairman of the Paris-based West and Oriental Culture Promotion Association, who co-initiated the event, says the introduction is to give the Chinese audience an idea of French style of conceptual art.

"Such art is not fixed as a painting or a sculpture," he explains. "It intends to convey an idea or a concept to the perceiver, which rejects the creation or appreciation of a traditional art object as a precious commodity."

Nicola's "work" is the manifestation of the ideas she claims -- peace and harmony. One of the Chinese participants "admires" the Cape for bringing together the color blue, an association of calm and peace, and the Great Wall, a remnant of warfare, in harmony despite their contrast.

Zhang Dong, a 40-year-old who has been working on performance art in China for decades, sees more than that. "Performance art, which emerged from the West in the 1960's, is a creative expression of an artist's thought but carries different meanings to different viewers," he says.

As it is termed, the form relies on the artist's per-formance, which was first conducted in France in 1961, Nicola's motherland, by a man jumping down from a tall building stretching straight his arms in a symbolic gesture of peace.

Starting her performance art career using giant cloths as early as 1969, Nicola began her "Blue Cape" series in July 2000 and toured around the world, visiting Havana, Venice, Geneva, Los Angles, with local people taking part in the "creation" voluntarily.

Everywhere, Nicola would ask participants the same questions, such as the most impressive persons and the most influential events of the year to them. "By doing this," she says, I'd want to know what people in different nations think and what's going on in the world."

Nicola's performance art indeed "brings her Chinese counterparts some enlightening ideas on what modern art is or about," says Ling Fei, who is a well-established Chinese artist in France.

Chinese creations

As compared with Nicola's expression, Zhang Dong observes that Chinese performance artists, who did not begin to flourish until the 1980s, are sometimes too indulged in releasing the pains they bear in this form. "Artists are sensitive and they are likely to have their personal pains embodied in their works. In other words, they use art as a way to vent their personal anguish," he says.

Owing to the lack of records, it is hard to account the exact number of artists engaged in performance art during the 1980s, but Zhang notes that many of them have already stopped to do that.

Consequently, their works are often too graphic or too obscene for viewers. A man once daubed his body with honey and squatted nude in a public toilet for two hours to have his body covered with flies. Others hired people to slap themselves on face, lacerated their own wrists to let blood drip or planted grass on their shoulders, while others seared their ID numbers on the back.

Chen Lusheng, an artist of traditional Chinese paintings at the Chinese Research Institute of Arts and author of the book "In The Name of Art," calls such behavior "more extremist than performance art."

"Their performances are inhumane, immoral or unethical to the viewers," he observes.

"Some modern artists intend to demonstrate their rebellion in eccentric expressions," says art critic Ding Mu, adding: "in that sense, their art works are more of something to call attention or sensation to themselves rather than a art."

Chen Lusheng fears that such extreme performances would arouse repulsion of audiences. In 2003, a teacher in South China's Guangdong Province sued the performer of the 12 Square Meters, who covered his body with flies in the toilet, for psychological abuse. While the court ruling has yet to be announced, an ongoing poll on sina.com, China's leading portal website, suggests that 47.4 per cent of the 78,379 voters view the performances as a misconception toward art. And in April 2001, the Ministry of Culture banned public performance of bloody, cruel or erotic scenes.

Zhang Dong hopes that Nicola's Blue Cape could give Chinese performance artists a new revelation.

"Performance art is not sensational, but aesthetic and pleasing," he says, recalling that each participant put on a smile immediately as they slipped into the huge cloth, and even laypeople like Yu, the vendor, are interested while watching the performance attentively.

Nicola says she also learned a lot during her short journey to China. "A clearer view of the world is helpful to my work," she says.

Her next stop is New York City, where people experienced a horrible terrorism attack, and where she would like to invite more people into her huge cloth and "show the world that life is like the epiphyllum flower, and could be splendidly gorgeous, but transitory. If there is any idea behind the Cape, that would be it: appreciate peace, and enjoy life."

(China Daily February 18, 2005)