He is Not a Monster, He is Xiaohe（2025）
Performance
Variable size
Cotton stuffed doll clothes, Cigarettes
This performance art piece took place at the entrance of the Xiamen Sino-Africa Wildlife Zoo. The artist and another performer, clad in crocodile costumes, simulated a fight between two crocodiles, and then one was ultimately defeated and fell down. On the spot, a satirical and politically adapted song No Ambition played on a loop.
Through absurd visual confrontation and highly satirical pop culture symbols, the work commemorates Xiaohe, a crocodile and "cross-strait exchange envoy" that died due to poor rearing conditions. It transforms an individual tragedy into a public complaints of managerial incompetence and the banality of evil.
By resorting to Meme, the work repurposes the viral interrogation theme song of Wang Shih-chien (a standing committee member of Taiwan's Democratic Progressive Party) into a playful, deconstructionist artistic method, achieving a silent resistance against banal power. Having studied how Taiwanese political language evolved into a satirical symbol within the mainland context after being clipped into short videos, the artist chose to create direct visual conflict at the zoo entrance where Xiaohe suffered, urging passersby and zoo management personnel to confront the concealed pain.
Such intervention leverages the "awkwardness" and "farce-like" inherency of the spoof song, trying to break the solemnity of official announcements and prompting the public to re-examine the truth behind Xiaohe's death, forming an informal, grassroots protest. The work materializes Wang Shih-chien's critique of municipal chaos of "no ambition" into the comical struggle of two "crocodiles", revealing how the demise of a real life is gradually being replaced by those negligible commercial symbols. Through this expression, the work attempts to expose the hypocritical grand narrative that reduces living beings to mere "tools of exchange", laying bare the real cruelty faced by individual life once symbolic significance vanishes. Ultimately, via the voice of a political figure to denounce the dereliction of power, the artist successfully transforms a political critique of institutions that "tell brazen lies" into a radical call for social conscience and the dignity of life.