In recent years, the Chinese State has positioned itself as a relatively more tolerant gatekeeper of public culture. Allowing the legitimate proliferation of contemporary art galleries and exhibitions, and protecting the 798 Art Factory space from being razed to make way for commercial real estate development by designating 798 as a cultural zone, this tolerance is parlayed into international cultural capital and underlies a strategy of cooptation and neutralization via inclusion. The new governance of contemporary art involves the astute use of space, seeking to domesticate contemporary art within the confines of privately owned galleries that often self-censor, hewing to less "sensitive" materials for exhibition. This strategy of governments seeks to harness the power effects of global capital as the Chinese art market disciplines and delineates the parameters of authorized expression, determining who has a place within these designated spaces, just as market reform is determining who in Chinese society has a legitimate presence in the State-dominated public sphere. In this context, the meaning and significance of art that takes place outside these spaces becomes a critical question.

If Chinese contemporary art is to maintain at least a quasi-autonomous existence, the importance of art that challenges the domesticating effects of global capital and creates "alternative public spaces," is seminal. A few performance pieces are noteworthy for their attempts to engage members of society in the production of the artwork and use public space to insert performance art into the larger social field.

The work of Chinese performance and visual artist Han Bing, 31, does just this with his "spontaneous interventions in public places""street corner" performance art that takes place at random intervals in Chinese society. A departure from the overtly political overtones and cynical manipulation of the foreign market's yen for anything that smacks of dissent which cynical realism and political pop exploited, the new critical contemporary art focuses on more on social engagement and inclusion of the excluded than on overt criticism.

Han Bing's public performances involve the novel use of ordinary, everyday objects, so close to the daily lives of China's masses that their value is often rendered invisible, in order to stimulate a reconsideration of our relationship to the material world around us, and the meaning of our everyday practices. Evocative of Hannah Arendt's amor mundi–love of the world–his ongoing performance Walking the Cabbage (2000-2005) has become urban legend nationwide, reaching millions of ordinary Chinese who might never set foot in an art gallery. Like the Russian Futurists of the teens and twenties, who used spontaneous performance art in public places to deliver "a slap in the face of the public taste" and force people in society to question their assumptions, Han Bing uses a quintessentially Chinese symbol of home, sustenance, comfort and nurture for poor Chinese–a Chinese boy chok cabbage–to provoke questions about contemporary social values and comment on the ways in which our treatment and use of the objects in our world invests them with their particular, historically situated, socially constructed meanings.

Likewise, bricks are another important signifier in Han Bing's work. In "Superfluous Remnants of an Already Backward Modernity: Everyday Precious No. 6, " the bricks clutched in the hands of the migrant construction workers are an ironic symbol of an ephemeral modernity, promised and then snatched away before coming to fruition. During the 80s, brick constructions were a national symbol of modernity, a promise of a new life, and a society of modest prosperity (xiaokang shehui). But just as rural China was beginning to move from homes of straw, mud and stone, into homes of brick, bricks were declared outdated, and backward. The new standard became the steel, concrete and glass high-rise, unreachably expensive for the rural poor, and a reminder of their increasing marginalization. Since the late 90s, brick structures have been demolished en mass, and the bricks, hauled away on mule-carts by peasants whose fortunes have yet to arrive. This bifurcated signification emblematizes powerfully the ethos of China's modernization. Han Bing and the peasant construction workers, who worked red-faced and gloveless through the bitter Beijing winter of 2003-2004 without adequate clothing, and eventually without pay, raise these bricks in grim tribute. And for the rural poor who haul brick rubble away, this so-called "refuse" is nevertheless, precious indeed.

By involving marginalized people in his performance art and documenting the works with conceptual photography, Han Bing takes a step towards bringing the excluded into the public sphere. In this new regime of modernization, labor, hunger, and the necessities of the body, obscured from the public eye and symbolically relegated by global capital to the private sphere. They are designated as individual, private, personal problems, rather than public and social problems that concern us all. Han Bing's social performance art and conceptual performance photography engage public space in novel ways to challenge the glossy myths of a rosy modernity, breaking down the institutionalized binary divisions between public and private, asking us to question what the right order of things should be and how we choose to position ourselves in this brave new world.