With its one hundred carefully selected color images of artistic works and nineteen translated essays by Chinese (including Taiwanese) artists and intellectuals, The Body at Stake makes an important contribution to English-language scholarship and primary sources on Chinese contemporary art and performance. The style of essays ranges from academic articles (Zhang Nian and Amy Cheng) and art criticism (Zhang Hong, Gao Shiming, Gu Zheng, Lu Yinghua, Li Yinan, Lin Chiwei), to personal reflections by artists about their own work (Zhao Chuan, Li Ning, Wen Hui, Wu Wenguang, Lu Yang, Yang Fudong) and transcripts of interviews and conversations between artists and art critics (Zhao Chuan with Xiang Jing, Chen Lingyang, and Jin Feng; Yang Guang with Zheng Bo; and Cao Fei with an unidentified interviewer). These, together with a short introduction by Jörg Huber, a captioned picture essay by Jörg Huber and Zhao Chuan, and a glossary of contributors, make up the contents of the book.

Rather than detracting from the book's quality, the variety in format is one of the book's strengths: it makes the book highly readable while making the voices of the artists as audible as those of scholars and critics. In some cases, multiple views are presented on a single artist's work. For example, on the work of Chen Lingyang, Yang Fudong, Zhao Chuan, and Xiang Jing, we read critical essays that place the works in historical or comparative context, as well as first-person narratives about the creative process and the artist's own views. Several essays by female artists are particularly revealing: Xiang Jing on her painted fiberglass sculptures of scarred, sagging, and masturbating female nudes; Wen Hui on her physical dance theatre works dealing with individuals’ memories of giving birth and everyday life during the Cultural Revolution; Chen Lingyang on her photographic exhibit of menstruation and flowers. Each of these essays confronts the reader with unexpected juxtapositions of ideas and approaches, for example, when a female artist describes her feminist agenda using the language of gendered essentialism. This complexity is what makes the book fascinating on multiple levels. Not only does it familiarize readers with key figures and works in Chinese contemporary art, but it also investigates social issues through reflections on art and artistic process.

The greatest strength of the book is its sustained attention to the central theme of the body in contemporary Chinese art and performance. Edited volumes often fail to cohere around their stated themes, offering a collection of isolated essays rather than a critical conversation. The Body at Stake is an exception to this pattern. From beginning to end, the book consistently addresses how the body figures into the artistic works discussed, while also showing how that body may be diversely conceived. The two academic articles by Zhang and Cheng position the body as a political arena, actor, or object that arises in resistance to political oppression: Zhang, for example, sees the emergence of the desiring, sexualized body in the Reform Era as a negation of communist ideology and of the very logic of revolution. “[W]hat revolution requires is precisely the negation of the human body,” Zhang writes (p. 18). Cheng similarly describes Taiwan's cultural movements of the 1980s as arenas in which “the body became a strategy for activism within the arts” (p. 146). While this forms the dominant approach of the book, several essays offer other, sometimes more interesting, possibilities for conceiving of the body in Chinese contemporary art. Gao Shiming's poetic treatment of Xiang Jing's sculptures introduces the relationship between corporeality and representation, through themes of aging, scars, weight, and moment-ness. Lin Chiwei explores the possibility of body-centered art as an indigenous Eastern critique of Western modernism, in an exploration of what she calls the “lifework” of six Taiwanese artists. Lu Yang explores the body as a site of technologized violence in a series of “bioart” works interrogating various relationships between animation, machine, and new media.

Some limitations of the book may also be noted. First, there is no glossary of Chinese names and terms and almost no Chinese words in either characters or pinyin (with the exception of a few phrases in Helen Walliman's translations). Thus the reader is left guessing which characters are used to write the Chinese proper names cited in the text, what the original Chinese names are of key artistic works, and what Chinese terms correspond to key concepts and phrases used in the essays. Second, with no list of images or index, the reader is forced to flip pages to search for specific references and photos. Finally, with its focus on the body in contemporary Chinese art, the book as a whole takes a simplistic and almost universally negative view of Chinese art before the 1980s. In this sense, it follows the presentist bias unfortunately typical of most scholarship on post-Mao and post-martial law art and performance in China and Taiwan.

Overall, this book is an important resource for anyone interested in contemporary visual and performance art involving the body, as well as for those interested in contemporary Chinese art culture generally.