The Price of Blood: Zhang Huan’s 65 Kilograms and China’s HIV/AIDS Crisis

This lecture revisits Zhang Huan’s 65 Kilograms (1994), a visceral performance in which the artist hung suspended while his blood slowly dripped onto a hot plate, filling the room with the smell of coagulation. Situating the performance within China’s 1990s plasma economy and the HIV/AIDS outbreak caused by unsafe blood collection, the talk reads the work through the bodily vulnerability of rural migrant labourers, particularly those from Henan, the epicentre of the crisis. As a migrant artist himself, Zhang’s bleeding body becomes a powerful site where fears of blood-borne contagion, economic extraction and artistic self-exposure converge. The performance reveals the necropolitical conditions under which rural bodies were rendered expendable in the wake of post-Mao market reform.

Dr Sophie Guo is an art historian and curator working across modern and contemporary Sinophone and global visual culture, with a particular focus on the intersections of art, medicine and biopolitics. She holds a PhD from The Courtauld Institute of Art, London, and is the Sir William Dobell Visiting Fellow at the Australian National University in 2026.