In her performative lecture at the Kunstvereinsheim Yingmei Duan played the role of a museum guide(with curators Susanne Jakubczyk from Kunstverein Kassel and Angelika Burtscher from Galery Lungomare Bolzano in the role of the artist Duan) who gave an imaginary tour of Duan’s exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in Beijing in 2008. Walking through the exhibition spaces, Duan showed her paintings from the 1990s and her performances in Beijing’s east Village from 1995, but also performances without interactions(a.o. “In between”, “Paradise”), interactive performances (a.o. “Sleepwalker” and “Menschenwald”), and experimental concepts (a.o. “26 Days in OKS”) from 1991 until today.

Duan ended her lecture with two live performances. In the first performance, set in an imaginary cemetery, she was seen rubbing insect-repelling cream on her legs and shouting repeatedly: “Ticks, ticks, please don’t come near me! You know that I have no feeling for you. I don’t want to become your friend.” The public was subsequently asked to imagine an empty room and to stand silently in the dark for a few minutes.