Bolun Shen

Bolun Shen
Born	China
Known for	Performance, Activism
Website	shenbolun.art

Bolun Shen is an artivist from China.

As a transdisciplinary artist, he works primarily through performance, theater, social intervention, video, and text. Most of his personal projects do not necessarily end up in attending exhibitions or residencies, but rather make influences to the real world. Bolun believes art is not only aesthetic or spiritual, but should also make a difference in social awareness, especially in China. He believes that art projects should influence social consciousness, especially in his home country of China. His work plays an important role in advancing both politically and individually in China.

Bolun Shen's practice often produces a large number of texts, including dialogues, interviews, debates, propaganda, public speeches and storytelling, to establish or challenge public memory and social norms.

Bolun's works and talks have been seen in China, Finland, the United States, Switzerland, Singapore and other locations, and have received funding and collaboration from institutions such as the Pro Helvetia, the Singapore Art Museum, Greenpeace China, and the United Nations Population Fund. He has given six TEDx talks in China, one of which was included in the official TED China in 2019.

Education and early career

Bolun spent most of his life in Shanghai and Beijing, with a brief period in North America. He graduated with a degree in Communication from Communication University of China. After gaining experience in journalism and marketing, Bolun researched the state of journalism in China. He aimed to work in the creative industry, but after two years in office-based roles, he transitioned to documentary filmmaking and began exploring other artistic fields.

Notable works

Theatre

Would you allow me to be Swiss?, 2022 is a theatre work is inspired by the classic 1978 Swiss film The Swissmakers and offers a renewed reflection on Switzerland’s immigration issues in recent years. The performance featured a speech given in a fictional Cantonal Migrant Session, where the audience was asked to vote on the presenter's citizenship. Before the performance, mock official flyers, posters and press passes were created and distributed. The speech was delivered in Chinese, while a German translator was appointed by “the Session”, adding to the performance's rhythmic flow. The solo performance at Kaserne Basel in Switzerland was created during an art residency sponsored by Pro Helvetia. The system of direct democracy in Switzerland is of great interest to Shen Bolun. During his three-month stay, he researched its structure and got in touch with local citizens to find out how their lives are affected by it.

The Colosseum is an interactive theatrical project that rebuilds conversations and debates which involve voting systems, deliberation procedures and authority management. There is no script or professional actors/actresses participating, instead, an open discussion/debate/deliberation procedure is followed that everything happens on stage is improvisation and real-time interaction as all participants are average people. The project was practiced in Beijing 8 times, each with different rules and staging designs.

Where Is My Water? The first performance of this work was presented in McaM in 2018. The second time was in Wuzhen Theatre Festival in 2019, where Bolun missed. In this space was made into a huge fish tank, and everyone could peek at the two people through the transparent glass. The two actors who entered the fish tank were real lovers in reality.

In addition to the audience's reaction, the creators themselves were also involved, both actively and passively. Near the end of the performance, the sound of "The fish must die" was played in a loop, which came from an unexpected situation at the premiere. Lu Yuzhou's partner Shen Bolun publicly accused her of just using him to advance the experiment. She didn't want to discuss anything at all because she already had a clear answer in her mind.

Performance

See You in My Dreams, an iterative series of digitally connected bedtime story hours between Beijing (led by artist Shen Bolun) and Detroit, with Detroit artists The Hinterlands sharing daily US news propaganda about China as our Beijing counterparts fall asleep, and Detroit artists falling asleep twelve hours later to Chinese news propaganda about the US. Held in a simultaneous public iteration at MINORlab, (Beijing) and Discount Mattress (Detroit).

Independent Film

He appeared on stage in As Autumn Draws Near in 2022.

Artivism

In 2023, Bolun began working on the video activism project Action in Action , which was released on Chinese video platforms. Less than a year later, the account was banned, and the videos were taken down. However, they remain available on YouTube.

In 2024, Bolun began creating works under the fictitious collective name Action Office", addressing real-world situations including the Future Vote created in China, which led to his 38 days of detention by the authorities in 2024. This project is an artistic and gamified attempt at political practice. When participants write down the anticipated year, it is a solemn reflection. However, these reflections and expectations for the future are then turned into commodities and traded as commercial and gaming activities in the present. On January 13, 2024, the day of the Taiwan presidential election, the Action Office held an auction for 9 futures in mainland China.

In 2024, during his artist residency program at Singapore Art Museum, he also released some work samples under Action Office in the open studio.

Babel Tower was a sculpture collaborated with Greenpeace Beijing Office, made of discarded mobile phones and shaped like a cell tower in a bid to highlight the problem of electronic waste. Displayed in a busy shopping mall in Beijing, the sculpture attracted scores of curious bystanders who stopped to take photos of the exhibit.

Documentary

Bolun spent a year and a half filming the questions that 1,000 young people in ten cities across the country asked about the world. Exhibitions based on these questions was being held across the country and will go beyond China this summer to participate in the Helsinki Art Festival.

Neglect is an art installation created by Bolun, commissioned from a furniture craftsman for 500 RMB. The installation consists of a wooden box designed to house an iPad capable of playing 1,000 pre-recorded question videos, with built-in external audio. During a performance in a subway station at rush hour, train staff and police deemed the activity disruptive to passengers and intervened. Multiple staff members demanded Shen stop his actions. In the ensuing confrontation, they removed the wooden box from Shen’s head and escorted him off-site. Officials later stated that the performance had interfered with the normal flow of commuter traffic during peak hours. Some, however, argued that the artist aimed to challenge the “rigid patterns” of society and provoke public reflection on the mechanized nature of daily life. In another performance, Shen brought the wooden box to a self-study room at Peking University. Sitting among students, he used the installation to play videos raising questions about education, such as: “Is what you learn in class useful?” “How closely related are studying and working?” and “Why do underqualified teachers remain in their positions?” This performance aimed to spark students’ contemplation of the educational system and the meaning of learning. These artistic actions have sparked discussions about the boundaries of performance art in public spaces and have prompted reflections on societal routines and the education system.

Activism

Bolun Shen and his ex-partner Wu Xia, who were not married, had a daughter outside of marriage. They were informed that as an unmarried parent she would have to pay 40,000 yuan in “Social Maintenance Fees.” They decided to launch a crowd-funding campaign and started a debate about how involved the state should be in citizens’ decisions to have children. Hundreds of people have since offered to contribute money to help the new parents pay the fee. Bolun asked for donations from the public on Dreamore.com, a Chinese crowdfunding website. In the first 16 hours, 312 donors contributed 9,581 renminbi to his campaign, he said. Then, the crowdfunding website took down his campaign and asked him to return the contributions, citing pressure from the authorities. Mr. Shen’s appeal for donations also disappeared from WeChat, a widely used mobile messaging application.

Exhibitions and other public showing

Group Exhibitions

• Re-writing Theatre History, Archival Exhibtion of Contemporary Performing Arts in China, Nanjing, China, 2024
• Concept Transfer, Qingdao, China, 2024
• Participatory Exhibition with Archived Contemporary Performance, 2020 Twenty Years Towards a World Theatre, Shanghai, China, 2020
• Inter-World-View, Hangzhou, China, 2019
• Helsinki Festival, 2015

Screening

First Film Festival, Xining, China, 2023

Residencies

• Singapore Art Museum, 2024
• By Art Matters天目里美术馆, 2022
• Pro Helvetia, Basel, 2022

Speeches

• TEDxChengdu Edu, 2019
• TEDxTHU, 2018
• TEDxRUC, 2013