Han Bing & Kashmiri Cabbage Walker

The Kashmiri Cabbage Walker draws their strength from the absurdity of walking a cabbage on a small cart, a gesture that mocks the equal absurdity of the dangerous militarization of Kashmir, where there is one soldier to every seven civilians. Active since 2015, the Kashmiri Cabbage Walker is always in disguise, wearing a pheran—a traditional Kashmiri coat. They are a fugitive figure, of diffuse and collective subjecthood, allowing the action to be performed in solidarity with many struggles around the world while eluding surveillance and capture. Passing it on.

The Walking the Cabbage performance and movement was initiated by Han Bing in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square in 2000. Bing understands the cabbage as a symbol of rural sustenance, and points to its place in contemporary China, where, disregarded by poodle-walkers, it remains the main nourishment of those with limited resources. Walking a cabbage combines two elements—vegetable and movement—to address how everyday practices, identities, and ideas become naturalized through continuous repetition. By pulling these elements into a performative space, Bing inverts the idea of what is natural, putting into question what we believe constitutes us. They continued walking vegetables and objects in daily life for many years. This resonates deeply in contexts like Kashmir and Cairo.

Passing to Berlin twenty-five years after the first performance in Beijing, the displayed cart is a mischievous signal to the potential of radical actions, which in their silence and wit can be extremely loud. The absurdity of the urban performative walks by Bing and the Kashmiri Cabbage Walker inverts the logic of unjustified violence. A provocation for us to look into the normalized forms of oppression that surround us, or inhabit us.

Text: Valentina Viviani