Credit: Dangerous Minds / Miran Kramar

If the whole point of that kind of transgressive art is to freak people out, is it ever possible to overstep the mark? The work of Zhu Yu seems to be predicated upon asking that question with some of the most disturbing work to ever reach mainstream galleries.

If the idea is really to get under the skin, then surely, the more disgusting the better, right? Unless the answer is something that the people who claim to love transgressive art really, really don’t want to admit. That, really, they don’t want art that freaks out people, they want art that freaks out squares. That freaks out others. Them. Not us. We’re cool. We’re the in crowd, who like to be dangerous and edgy. What they like is just content, right?

Well, they should be rounded up and taken in a Tardis back to the year 2000, where Zhu Yu has just made and exhibited arguably the most controversial piece of art in the history of China.

In an exhibition called (wonderfully enough) Fuck Off, he exhibited his work of conceptual art, Eating People. It consisted of five photographs in which he appeared to cook and eat a stillborn, six-month-old human fetus. That’s transgressive, right.

The piece was so controversial that it was pulled before the exhibition actually opened. Word of the piece’s content got to the Chinese Ministry of Culture. After they contacted the exhibition and made it clear, under no uncertain terms, that the piece was acceptable, it was pulled before opening. Yet the news of the piece’s existence spread like wildfire, and Yu was only too happy to provide the photos to overseas media outlets, to mixed results.

After all, what he wanted to do was (supposedly) start a conversation about bodily autonomy in modern-day China, not feed into a deeply racist conspiracy theory about what China did with their surplus population.

That’s where the photos ended up, after all. After they were shown in a documentary about the contemporary Chinese art scene, they found their way into several chain email hoaxes, all seeking to discredit the Chinese people and their government. A bitter irony considering there’s an argument to be made that’s exactly what Yu was trying to do by making this grotesquerie, just not quite like that. A curl of the monkey paw’s finger, if there ever was one.

Now, to be clear, Yu has always maintained that the photos are legitimate, but they’re almost certainly not. A Snopes investigation ruled that the fetus was most likely made of a duck’s body with a doll’s head, but whether it’s true or not is almost beside the point. The depiction is the point, and if you’re unlucky enough to have seen them, they have the grotty, ghoulish feel of reality to them. The images don’t feel like a staged piece of art; they feel like candid’s snapped while someone goes about their everyday business. Which, of course, makes it so much worse.

Then you get to the final question, the overall point of it all. What is Eating People actually saying? Yu himself said that it came after spending almost the entire 1990s making art out of human corpses, and wanting to tackle what he saw as an unenforced, almost entirely social taboo. He said, “No religion forbids cannibalism. Nor can I find any law which prevents us from eating people. I took advantage of the space between morality and the law and based my work on it”.

So, there you go. If you really believe that art should shock and push buttons. How does this one sound to you? I don’t think it’s worthless, but it may not be far off. Then again, I might be one of the squares. Who knows.