Outdoor crawling in protest: what if inspiration came from an Italian artist?

There is a trend running rampant in China among college students forced to stay on campuses because of anti-Covid restrictions: in fact, a strange way of protesting (or resisting: it’s not clear) has sprung up on social media that is spreading across the country. Students, in particular, are gathering to crawl around in circles: this is their form of protest, or resistance, against the Zero-Covid regime, which for months has forced them not to be allowed to leave campuses except with permission, granted only in the face of very strong reasons. It happens mostly at sunset time or in the evening, when groups of students gather to crawl in circles in the gardens and courtyards of Chinese universities.

The fad has spread to the point that, reports Gianluca Modolo, China correspondent for Repubblica, some universities, such as Zheijiang University, are banning the practice. “Exhausted by lockdowns and with great uncertainty about the future,” Lin Shihou, a student at Chongqing University quoted by Modolo, wrote in a post, “the loss of meaning adds to the young people’s sense of existential crisis. Crawling is a collective ritual to release the feeling of being repressed by using nonmeaning to resist the nonmeaning around us.”

Many are wondering where this bizarre trend comes from: whether perhaps it refers to some strange form of ritual, or is a way of remembering childhood, or if it stems from exercise. The trend, Modolo says, started from an anonymous post by a student at Beijing Communication University. There is, however, a definite “iconographic” precedent, if you want to call it that, invented by an Italian artist, Wainer Vaccari of Modena, the author of numerous “patrols,” paintings in which strange characters with oriental somatic features crawl around in circles exactly as Chinese students do. An image of one of Vaccari’s patrols had been published, in 1996, in issue 2 of that year’s Shijie Meishu (“Art of the World”) magazine, one of the leading Chinese art magazines at the time.

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The article, titled “Playing in the Imaginary Self. The Painting of the Italian Artist Wainver Vaccari,” wondered what the Modenese artist’s characters were doing: “these places - specific areas created for survival and body movement, freed from an inexplicable fate - here play an essential role in the atmosphere [...]: the incomprehensible infinite movement and the clear, solid scenes make reality and imagination interlock with each other like cogwheels.” It may be that this is just a coincidence, but who knows, whoever came up with the crawling-in-a-circle fad might not be someone who happened to have the 2/1996 issue of Shijie Meishu magazine in his hands and, fascinated by Vaccari’s painting, decided to bring it into modern-day reality...

Pictured below: left, Chinese students crawling. On the right, Vaccari’s work published in Shijie Meishu in 1996.

Outdoor crawling in protest: what if inspiration came from an Italian artist?

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