Her artwork explores nudity, mental illness, memory, and mother-daughter relationships through performance, photography, and video.
Having faced years of humiliation from giving birth out of wedlock, He's mother was left with no job and a jailed husband and began suffering from considerable mental distress.
[1] He taught mathematics at an elementary school for three years before attending the Sichuan Fine Arts Institute, where she trained as an oil painter.
[5] Families Affected by Mental Illness premiered in 2007 at the Zendai Museum of Modern Art in Shanghai.
[6] He expressed in an interview, “I hope people can pay attention to the children from poor families and those who suffer from mental illness.
[9] Although her performances are frequently considered transgressive and are frowned upon by many including He's friends and teachers, this only reaffirms He's belief in the necessity of her work as both an intensely powerful form of self-expression and a challenge against social stigmas surrounding mental illness.
[1] Critics have also stressed how He's performance work engages with feminism, body politics, and nationalist and transnational issues.
Opening the Great Wall was the first of many works in which He explores Chinese social and political issues by using her own body as an artistic medium.
[3] He revealed in an interview that the series “allowed me to squarely face my family’s history of insanity that I had carefully hidden and avoided for so long, to reaffirm the family line that connects me and my mother, and to partially satisfy a yearning of more than thirty years to support, touch, and embrace her.”[3] Taking place in an open courtyard, He wore a hand-sewn, white robe that hung to her ankles for this performance as she walked barefoot along a long gray brick wall.
He frantically chased after the light with erratic movements while a Buddhist meditation chant played in the background.
[2] He explained in an interview that “...the light came to represent life, as well as the things we desire, be it power, money, or romantic love.
[7] In 2002, He sought to fully embody the suffering her mother went through at the hands of pseudo-acupuncturists who had tried to cure her mental illness by forcefully doing acupuncture on her in the 1960s.