Darling Hurt I
— The Rainbow

Darling Hurt is a series of outdoor socially engaged theatre works by Xiao Ke and Zi Han. It brings conceptual body performance into the urban public environment, connecting the artists’ personal lives with the city where they live and taking performance onto the street to create contact and interaction with the public.

From 8am on 24 September until 3am on 25 September 2011, Xiao Ke walked in Shanghai for 19 hours, pushing a movable portal frame on which her daily clothes were hung in the colours of the rainbow. Zi Han recorded this rainbow for the full 19 hours in more than 3,000 photographs. The itinerary passed through roads, architecture, and residential areas that are emblematic of Shanghai. Although Xiao Ke and the rainbow never leave the frame, they are gradually overtaken by the abundance of the city’s backgrounds; when the photographs appear as a whole, the performance fades into the images.