In recent years, many of these artists have made performances specifically for photography or film.
In 2000, Zhu Yu, a painter and performance artist from Cheng Du, created a scandal by taking a number of photographs of himself, supposedly eating a fetus as a protest against state abortions as a means of population control.
Peng Yu and Sun Yuan have also worked with human body parts as well as with live animals and are equally notorious.
Some younger performance artists who have exhibited widely in the west in 2005-6 are Shu Yang, the organiser of the Dadao Live Art Festival in Beijing, Yang Zhichao, famous for having his identity card number branded on his back and Wang Chuyu who went on hunger strike as part of an exhibition called Fuck Off that took place in Shanghai in 2000 in opposition to the Shanghai Biennale.
They acknowledge a debt to older performance artist and curator Ai Weiwei.