After Cleansing: The Body, Social Relations and Visual Resonance in Three Works by Liu Qiming

Abstract: This essay examines the acts of cleansing, transfers of matter and changes in the body’s situation in Liu Qiming’s Cleansing, Washing Hands and Teeth Cleaning. Drawing on the visual resonance of the “red circle,” it considers how the artist uses the body to engage with historical memory, social relations and the conditions of care, transforming everyday actions into social criticism.

Keywords: Liu Qiming; performance art; social engagement; the body; visual form

1. The Consequences of Cleansing

Cleansing implies a change of some kind. Yet dirt does not disappear simply because it has been removed from its original location, and a clean surface does not necessarily mean that a problem has been resolved. Liu Qiming’s Cleansing, Washing Hands and Teeth Cleaning bring into view the processes and consequences of this everyday act that are easily overlooked.

The three works can be read as a trilogy of “cleansing.” Their most striking connection lies in the body’s changing position: in Cleansing, the artist works on an object laden with cultural and political meaning, then swallows what remains; in Washing Hands, he invites others to participate, then drinks the liquid in which they have washed; in Teeth Cleaning, the body itself becomes the object of cleaning and maintenance. The mouth runs through all three, first as an opening that receives what is left over, and then as a site of care.

This connection keeps social questions grounded in something concrete. Liu Qiming enters the action with his own body and bears its consequences. The history, public responsibility and institutional arrangements that concern him are thus brought into contact with bodily experience. The works ask: what does cleansing change, what does it leave behind, and who must face what remains?

2. Cleansing: A History That Cannot Be Peeled Away Intact

Cleansing: document 02

In Cleansing (2012), Liu Qiming repeatedly works on a red apple with cleaning products and tools. As its red skin is gradually removed, its flesh is worn away as well. The artist swallows the core that remains.^[1]

The red apple’s cultural significance begins with its familiarity. In Chinese gift-giving and festive life, the apple often carries wishes for peace and safety through the phonetic association between píng, in píngguǒ (apple), and píng’ān (peace and safety); red adds a celebratory meaning. In this work, however, the same red also points to memories of mobilization, veneration and violence in modern Chinese political history. The auspicious red of the household and the authoritative red of political life coexist in a single everyday object.

This coexistence deserves particular attention. In accepting a color, people may also accept the feelings and values attached to it. Familiar experiences of everyday life make certain political symbols feel intimate; political expression, in turn, gains acceptance through the emotions of family, festivals and collective life. What Liu Qiming works on, then, is a history that has entered personal experience and is difficult to separate from it.

The apple’s material transformation makes this difficulty visible. Skin and flesh are connected: once the removal of the surface continues inward, it damages the apple itself. Here, intellectual self-examination encounters a cost registered through bodily experience: how can a person reject ideas that have shaped them while preserving the life entangled with those ideas?

The work’s “cleansing” therefore also touches on “brainwashing.” Self-reflection may begin as an attempt to escape coercion, but if purity becomes its sole aim and complex experience is treated indiscriminately as an impurity to be removed, reflection may itself return to coercive methods. The work offers no intact apple after a successful cleansing. It leaves damage behind, and through swallowing brings that damage back into relation with the artist’s body.

In Balkan Baroque, Marina Abramović scrubs cattle bones, confronting the act of cleaning with the injuries and memories of war.^[2] The two works invite comparison through the limits of cleansing, but Liu Qiming’s emphasis lies closer to the interior of the self: the person doing the cleansing has also been shaped by history. Swallowing the core prevents him from standing outside what is being removed. Once the performance ends, he must still face what remains.

3. Washing Hands: How One Person’s Cleanliness Rests on Another’s Burden

Washing Hands: document 02

In Washing Hands (2013), Liu Qiming pours red wine into a glass vessel and invites viewers to wash their hands. After each person washes, he takes a large drink of the liquid, continuing until it is all gone.^[3]

The choice of red wine establishes the work’s particular context. Within certain forms of consumption in China, wine is associated with European and American lifestyles, petit-bourgeois refinement and social taste. Using it to wash hands changes the drink’s purpose and places the image of respectability attached to it in an incongruous setting.

The more significant change occurs within the material itself. Dust and other matter from the hands enter the wine, turning a liquid intended for drinking into the mixture left after washing. It may remain red, held in the same transparent vessel, but it is no longer the original wine. The work confronts viewers with both a familiar cultural image and the actual changes taking place beneath it.

Liu Qiming then drinks it. Cleansing here follows a traceable path: dirt leaves the participants’ hands, enters the vessel, and then enters the artist’s body. One person becomes clean; another receives what that cleansing leaves behind. Swallowing prevents this relationship from remaining merely symbolic.

The work’s social criticism arises from this arrangement. It draws attention to the ways cleanliness and respectability in everyday life often depend on burdens borne out of sight. Liu Qiming does not make the participants stand for a particular class, nor does he simply equate red wine with a political or social system. He establishes a relationship on site, making viewers aware that their actions have consequences—and that someone else is receiving them.

Yoko Ono’s Cut Piece likewise invites viewers to act, allowing their participation to directly alter the artist’s bodily situation.^[4] What distinguishes Washing Hands, however, is the distance between the mildness of the action and its consequences. Washing one’s hands is so ordinary, and the invitation seems so easy to accept, that only when the artist drinks the liquid must participants reconsider the action they have just performed.

Liu Qiming proposes the rules himself, and this preserves the work’s ethical complexity. Voluntarily accepting a burden does not remove the need to question how it is borne. The more willing the artist appears to be, the more viewers must consider whether one person’s consent is enough to justify an unequal relationship. Praising sacrifice can sometimes bring an end to questions about why that sacrifice occurs.

4. Teeth Cleaning: The Social Conditions of Bodily Maintenance

Liu Qiming, Teeth Cleaning, New York, 2026, process documentation 1.

In Teeth Cleaning, the camera stays close to the face, with the open mouth at the center of the frame. Gloved hands enter from different directions, instruments and suction tubes gathering around the teeth. The recording retains the sounds of suction, machinery and conversation among the care providers, with speech partly obscured by the sounds of the procedure. The artist must hold his position and cooperate with the work of others.

The mouth that received the apple core and red wine in the earlier works now becomes the object of care. The viewer’s position changes accordingly. Rather than attending only to what the artist can endure, viewers begin to confront the needs of the body itself.

The ordinariness of teeth cleaning is an important condition of the work. There is no need for an extraordinary bodily act to produce tension: the close framing alone conveys the vulnerability of a mouth exposed to the work of others. By placing this private experience before a public gaze, the artist opens the living conditions behind personal habits to discussion.

Regular dental maintenance may seem a personal choice, but that choice is shaped by upbringing, financial resources, health knowledge and access to services. Explaining a prolonged lack of care solely through cultural habits risks turning differences produced by social conditions into individual failings. The work thus raises institutional questions: can preventive maintenance be reliably obtained, how are costs and services organized, and who must wait until they are in pain before seeking help?

Mierle Laderman Ukeles’s “maintenance art” brings the labor of cleaning and care into artistic discussion, drawing attention to the work that keeps everyday life going.^[5] Teeth Cleaning begins instead with the body receiving care, bringing that labor and the person it serves into the same frame. The hands in the image do not represent care in the abstract: they are carrying out specific tasks. Whether a body can be maintained also depends on whether such work is available as an accessible service.

From the imagined lifestyle represented by red wine to the actual conditions involved in oral care, Liu Qiming’s cross-cultural experience undergoes a shift here. To observe a society, one must look not only at the tastes and lifestyles it displays but also at how it addresses the bodily needs of ordinary people. The social questions raised by Teeth Cleaning lie precisely in these everyday, concrete arrangements.

5. Three Red Circles

The red apple, the red wine in the round glass vessel and the open mouth establish a visual resonance of “red circles” across the three works. Teeth Cleaning offers a clear example: the lips surround an almost circular opening, its interior red accentuated by concentrated light and the darkness around it, echoing the apple’s skin and the field of red wine in the vessel.

Each circle has its own form. The apple is a solid object, the wine in the vessel appears as a liquid surface, and the mouth leads into the body. Red moves from an object’s surface, through a space containing liquid, to the color of bodily tissue itself. The resemblance among these images allows the act of looking to continue across the works; their different functions continually change the meaning of the same form.

This connection reveals Liu Qiming’s ability to discern visual relationships within everyday things. The choices of materials, vessels and camera angle all contribute to the works’ construction. Social relations within the actions take shape through these visible forms: the apple undergoes removal, the vessel gathers the residue of cleansing, and the mouth receives it before finally exposing itself. The conceptual connections among the three works thus acquire a visual basis.

The value of reading the works as a trilogy does not lie in establishing a path from trauma to healing. Teeth Cleaning has neither erased history nor resolved the unequal relationship in Washing Hands. What it changes is the way we regard the person who bears the burden: a body can engage with society, express refusal and accept consequences, but these actions cannot become reasons to disregard its needs.

By grounding social engagement in his own body, Liu Qiming also requires criticism to return to that body. If viewing stops at understanding symbols or praising endurance, it has not yet reached the questions the works leave behind. Why must a person bear so much, and who should establish the conditions that enable that person to go on living?