It all started with a gun-shot.

In February 1989, when artist Xiao Lu transformed her installation, "Dialogue," into a performance piece by firing a gun into a mirror, authorities closed (what had been) a government-sanctioned avant-garde art exhibition at the National Art Gallery in Beijing. Just months later, the Tiananmen Square riots took place; the ensuing crackdown on all social, cultural and political arenas of life left conceptual artists retreating to confined and secluded spaces. Whereas the majority of the 1980s had offered a virtual renaissance for artists, in '89 official and commercial galleries suddenly became unwilling to consider the new schools of art that emerged after the Cultural Revolution, leaving artists to seek out places to display their work.

As a result, many artists turned their homes into galleries in the deep underground movement that is now referred to as "Apartment Art." Internationally recognized curator Gao Minglu defines this period as "art that responded to the moment, the condition of making art in the early 1990s in China." The tightened restrictions in the aftermath of Tiananmen Square relegated contemporary artists to the only materials and spaces available to them: their personal possessions and their own apartments. Had it not been for Gao, who coined the phrase and tracked the work, the virtually silent sub-culture of art might have been lost to the pages of history.

This Dada-influenced movement relied on ready-made objects, performances and Zen Buddhism. Apartment-confined works were small in scale, as well as in audience. It was common for artists to send out postcards informing others of their "exhibitions." In the absence of a real audience and a "gaze" to render the art actual, these artists often confronted the confounding subject, "nothingness," in their work. Whether it wanted to or not, Apartment Art broke from reflecting the consumerist society at large and dealt with the private world and personal discourse.

Now acclaimed photo, video and installation artist, Song Dong, generated a piece of Apartment Art called "The Water Writing Diary" that began in 1995 and is ongoing. As a child, Song's family had been too poor to afford ink and paper, so his father instructed the boy to practice his calligraphy by painting water on a stone. In homage to his childhood education, Song uses a calligraphy brush to make daily entries on a particular block of stone that has become his performance diary; the entries wash away almost as abruptly as Song writes them. Certainly, this approach ensures a safe form of personal expression in a country with a history of stealing, hoarding, reading and burning citizen's private journals. Song has noted, "after a while this stone slowly becomes a part of me. That means I could say anything to it and be unscrupulous." Everyday, Song takes four photographs of the stone to document the process.

Artist Yin Xiuzhen, who happens to be married to Song, embraces art that reflects the living environment and highlights the dichotomy between individual experience and global transformation. To create her signature Apartment Art piece, "Dress Box," Yin collected old clothes donated by civilians living in the outskirts of Beijing. After hand washing the garments, Yin hung them to dry in an abandoned pagoda. The moisture from the clothes dripped onto mounds of Plaster of Paris that the artist had placed underneath, ultimately transforming the plaster into cement. Yin believes "these combinations of antithetical things," the soft texture of human clothing and the hardened cement, "create ineffable feelings."

That same year Yin held an apartment installation in which she hoarded 25 pairs of shoes from people of all ages, cemented them and then hung the menagerie from her ceiling with hemp.

Qui Zhijie, whose art tackles the hefty philosophical struggle between destiny and self-determination, worked for five years on a piece of Apartment Art that he calls "Assignment No. 1: Copying the 'Orchard Pavilion Preface' a Thousand Times." The original "Orchard Pavilion Preface" belongs to a canonical 4th century work of Chinese calligraphy. From 1990-1995 Qui wrote, rewrote and then wrote again these ancient characters onto a single piece of paper. All of this calligraphy resulted in a sheaf of indecipherable black ink. According to Gao Minglu, Qui's "writing practice represents the search for origin in the absence of the original." This meditation on the idea of originality suggests that the origins may not lie in what is visible.

As more funds, media attention and physical spaces are allocated toward the ever-expanding art scene in China, these three artists have gone on to larger-scale, public installations that utilize a wider range of materials. However, during the brief period in the 1990s when Apartment Art was thriving—albeit almost invisible—they embraced the small, each working within his or her personal ideology, searching for a means to communicate ideas to an audience as ephemeral as their art.