# Bolun Shen

Bolun Shen is an artivist from China. He works primarily through performance, theater, social intervention, video, and text. Bolun believes art should make a difference in social awareness, especially in China. He 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, and Singapore, 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.

## Works
### Theatre and performance

Would you allow me to be Swiss? (2022) is a theatre work inspired by the 1978 Swiss film The Swissmakers and offers a reflection on Switzerland's immigration issues. 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 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. During his three-month stay, Bolun researched the system of direct democracy in Switzerland and interviewed 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 participating; instead, an open discussion/debate/deliberation procedure is followed, and everything that happens on stage is improvised real-time interaction among average people. The project was presented in Beijing 8 times.
Where Is My Water? was first presented in McaM in 2018. The second time was in Wuzhen Theatre Festival in 2019, where Bolun missed. The space was made into a huge fish tank, and everyone could peek at the two people through transparent glass. The two actors who entered the fish tank were real-life lovers. In addition to the audience's reaction, the creators themselves were 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. Shen Bolun publicly accused his partner Lu Yuzhou of using him to advance the experiment. She refused to discuss the matter.
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

Bolun 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 attempts political practice; participants in an auction write down an anticipated year, and 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, Bolun released some work samples under Action Office in the open studio.
Babel Tower was a sculpture project in collaboration with Greenpeace Beijing Office, made of discarded mobile phones and shaped like a cell tower, to highlight the problem of electronic waste. It was displayed in a shopping mall.

### 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. An exhibition based on these questions was held across the country and is hoped to go beyond China in 2025 at 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. In the ensuing confrontation, they removed the wooden box from Bolun's head and escorted him off-site. In another performance, Bolun 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?” These actions sparked discussions about the boundaries of performance art in public spaces and about the education system.

## Crowdfunding campaign

Bolun and his ex-partner Wu Xia, who were not married, had a daughter. They were informed that as an unmarried parent she would have to pay 40,000 yuan in Social Maintenance Fees. They launched a crowd-funding campaign on Dreamore.com in 2024 and started a debate about how involved the state should be in citizens’ decisions to have children. In the first 16 hours, 312 donors contributed 9,581 renminbi to the campaign. Then the crowdfunding website took down the campaign and asked him to return the contributions, citing pressure from the authorities. Bolun's appeal for donations also disappeared from the mobile messaging application WeChat.

## Exhibitions and other public showing
### Group Exhibitions

* Re-writing Theatre History, Archival Exhibition 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