Rong Rong’s 1994 photo ‘East Village, Beijing, No 34’ depicts artist Zhang Huan hanging by chains from the ceiling of his studio while blood drips from his neck on to a hot plate, producing an awful hiss and stench. Nell Freudenberger’s fictional versions of the near-mythical underground performances that took place in Beijing’s East Village in the years after the Tiananmen Square uprising animate a significant portion of her new novel, The Dissident, whose narrative is split between Beijing’s East Village in the 1990s and the lush suburbs of early 21st-century Los Angeles.

Read the full piece in the Observer here