The great irony of these live performances by contemporary Chinese artists is that it gives British audiences the opportunity to see a wide range of work that has little or no legitimacy in its homeland. Since they began creating a stream of work around 20 years ago, Chinese live artists have been subject to arrest, their exhibitions closed down and their work dismissed as degenerate. They have repeatedly been told that what they do isn't art at all.
One begs to differ; nonetheless it's easy to see why the Chinese authorities are rattled. These five performances from leading artists have a level of interaction with the audience that would only rarely be found in the work of many of their British counterparts. There is a whiff of danger and subversion in each of them - whether it is Kiss, a piece in which He Chengyao invites individual members of the audience to share an ice lolly with her in an act of quite terrifying intimacy, or Shu Yang's Dialogue in Chinese Style, which involves a hammer-and-sickle flag and the menacing use of a knife.
Not everything works. It may be close to Halloween, but I wasn't sure of the purpose of shaking Zhu Ming's skeletal hand, dripping with paint. And Yang Zhichao's Chinese Red, which invites a response from the audience to a story drawn in his own blood, is too intimate an experience to work for a large crowd.
There is a strong sense here of artists engaging directly with their society and determined not to let the audience off the hook. For British viewers, this is brought home in Wang Chuyu's Material Files of Sino-British Cooperation, a cheeky consideration of Anglo-Chinese trade relations involving paper aeroplanes, which inspired an equally cheeky response from the audience.
· At the the Victoria & Albert Museum, London SW7, tonight. Box office: 020-7942 2211.
