 The Curious Story of a Sub-Clavicle Piercing As a follow up to Jordan Ginsberg’s expose on sub-clavicle piercings, I am writing this article after a few strange occurrences in my piercing clinic a few days ago. It is now a well known fact, following the article on sub-clavicle piercings “WHYNOTHOWTO”, that I no longer perform this particular piercing for one reason or another, and indeed to quote Jordan, “[Sarge] has ceased performing the piercing altogether — no matter how frequent or demanding the requests.”“as each piece of my work continues, it becomes more and more cruel; all games can ultimately be lethal.” Well... this is the story of how I came to break that rule. Requests for this piercing keep on coming in at a steady rate of about two per week, as a direct result of that particular article. I’m still being polite about it and carrying out a lot of clavicle surface piercings instead (ie. above the bone, not around it). That was, until I was contacted by a company based in Newcastle upon Tyne called Amino. A guy called Ben Ponton asked me about the sub-clavicle piercings and whether I would be interested in doing one, to which I gave my standard well rehearsed answer, and directed him to Jordan’s article. When he explained the circumstances, I stopped in my tracks. Amino were hosting a live performance artist called ‘He Yun Chang’ from China who wanted a sub-clavicle piercing specifically for his work entitled ‘Dragon-Fish’ that he was performing there, and hinted that the piercing was something that was very important to the artist and a short explanation that this piercing may have some roots in North Korea — naturally I was very intrigued. Anyone who has read Jordan’s article can see that no-one is laying claim to actually ‘inventing’ that piercing — the way I found it was through my friends interest in the character ‘D’argo’ from Farscape and his insistence that we go for it... little did I know of its true and rather gruesome history. After looking through their website, and seeing that they worked with no other than the great Franko B, I have to admit I was totally sold on the idea. Live performance art has that sort of effect on me — it fires me up, and after doing a little research on Mr. Yun Chang on the net, here’s some of his work. And here’s the furore he caused at Niagara Falls! I wanted in! Ben emailed me the dates that they would come down to my clinic and I received the press release:
“He Yun Chang will write the two Chinese characters that form the words Dragon Fish on the ground then run around them in a circle for 24 hours continuously.So the date was set for the 9th of March, and at two o’clock our guests arrived.
Sarge: On the phone you hinted that the sub-clavicle piercing had a history that I may have not been aware of that was told to you by He Yun Chang — I’m intrigued.There followed a conversation where we tried to explain Body Modification Ezine to He Yun Chang and Hong, where He Yun Chang agrees that I can write about his piercing and the conversation about the Korean aspect of the sub-clavicle piercing, although during this conversation it is stressed that unfortunately they have no proof of these occurrences.
The Dragon Fish Performance  “Starting at 17:45 on 11 March 2006, 15 minutes later than advertised, He Yun Chang began the 24 hour performance of Dragon Fish. Amino’s Lee Callaghan tied one end of the 20 metre length of scarlet twine around the steel balls at the ends of the PTFE rod in Achang’s sub-clavicle piercing, the other end was attached to a specially rigged steel cable stretched taut across the atrium of the Central Square building.  Once secured, Achang strode, naked, into the centre of the performance space to where two sheets of paper had been fixed to the floor. With a stick of blood red pastel he quickly and unceremoniously, scribbled the two Chinese characters that form the words Dragon Fish and then casually sauntered off to the edge of the invisible circle he would follow over the next 24 hours. He began jogging in an almost indifferent way, in an anticlockwise direction, in a circle about 10 metres across, around the Dragon Fish, on a journey to nowhere that would last through the night and into most of the following day.”- Sarge IAM members click here to discuss or comment on this article
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