Altered Perceptions of Sleep: Performativity, Duration, and Embodied Relationships in Contemporary Sinophone Art

This dissertation examines how contemporary Sinophone artists construct disturbed perceptual states associated with sleep through performance, spatial practice, and photographic staging. I argue that disturbed states of sleep, analyzed through embodied, phenomenological, and culturally embedded dimensions, shift narratives that treat sleep as metaphor or a private symptom into a conversation that recognizes material processes and cultural forces, rendering such states visible and meaningful within contemporary art. Methodologically, the dissertation brings together phenomenological insights, an anthropological perspective, and an account of threshold states, while critically avoiding overreliance on psychoanalysis. Employing a comparative analysis of works by Duan Yingmei, Li Liao, Peng Wu, and Chen Wei, the research does not suggest that the artists are disturbed; rather, the archetypes of sleep anomalies are externalized as symptoms in these artists’ works. Through interactions of body, space, and medium, the artists’ tactics manipulate duration, embodiment, and environment, constructing a material interpretation of disturbed states of sleep and connecting such states to cultural quagmires. While Western clinical frameworks primarily characterize sleep disturbances as a neurological phenomenon, Sinophone artistic practices offer interpretations that draw on folkloric traditions, embodied memory, and supernatural elements. Across the globe, the art-historical lexicon has adopted a Western dictionary, yet this repertoire cannot easily be placed within the Sinophonic language. Sinophone artists recast sleep disturbances as a culturally meaningful experience, blending symptoms with haunting and connecting individual sensations to collective stories of supernatural encounters. This perspective is supported by research on the prevalence of supernatural explanations for sleep paralysis across cultures.