For 11 days beginning September 3, Ye Fu stayed in a cage in a community in Shanghai's Pudong.

During that time, he did not talk with anyone, including the visitors that came to his exhibition. All he could do was sleep and meditate.

Ye completed the task as part of his Urban Survival Experience series. He took part in two previous projects in Beijing last year.

Some people consider him a madman and think of his projects as rubbish, but others believe he is an honest artist who only wants to reveal the loneliness of all human beings.

As a controversial artist and poet, the 28-year-old always attracts a lot of attention.

Ye was born in 1978 in Linyi of Shandong Province. As with most youngsters who rebelled against the traditional education system, Ye said that he did not think he learnt anything from school.

"I think I'm always a pupil. I do not think that I benefited from so-called education from the schools. When I was alone, I liked to read anything about art and poetry, and gradually, I found I was deeply attracted by them," he said.

Ye said he owes the inspiration for his work to his father.

"My father also likes to write poems.He still travelled around the country after he had three children. When I was still a child,he encouraged me to be a wandering artist," Ye said. He added that when he was with his father, they often talked about famous writers, poets and their works.

"Last year when I went back to my home, my father told me that he was rather excited because he had just read all of Jorge Luis Borges' (an Argentine writer and poet) works. He even wrote 30 poems and asked me to amend them," he said.

According to Ye, he is still greatly influenced by his father's ideas. When Ye meets his father, he will often exchange his ideas with him.

Lonely wanderer

But for Ye, it's not easy to return to family life. An artist with avant-garde ideas, he gave up a smooth and steady life and became a wandering artist and poet.

"It was in 1999 that I became a wanderer,"he said. "I left home and started to wander around the country."

Ye said he chose to live like a vagrant because he did not like the lifestyles that his other family members expected him to have.

"All of them hoped that I would get married and have babies, but I did not like such things. It was not a good environment for me to carry on my artistic projects in my hometown, so I escaped from that environment,"he said.

After he left his hometown, Ye tried all kinds of jobs in different cities.

"I was a journalist, a salesman, a secretary for the president of an old university, a model for students at fine arts schools, and a chef. I even sold slippers in the bazaar and sold pictures I drew on the street. Sometimes I was a wandering singer," he said.

But he never stopped writing poetry - he calls it the thing that has always helped to overcome any difficulties.

"In 1998, when I was 20, I wrote my first poem. Maybe it was not a good poem in other people's eyes,but for me, it was the best and everything I do now originated from it," he said.

"Writing poems is the most important thing in my life - it saves me from desperation. It makes me feel that my life is so beautiful. Sometimes,I consider that poetry is my muted lover - she makes me so happy."

Ye has already written more than 20 volumes of poems.

A place of inspiration

In 2001, he went to Beijing and found that the city was a paradise for his ideals.

"Before I went to Beijing, I had been in Jinan, Suzhou,Shanghai, Hubei Province, Hunan Province,Guangzhou, Xi'an and Inner Mongolia, but I found that my inspirations were totally exhausted in those cities. When I arrived at Beijing, I felt that all my inspirations wererevived," he said.

In Beijing, Ye started to be engaged in performance art.

"I learnt a lot from my life in other cities.When I arrived at Beijing, I decided to create my own performance art works to reveal what I had learnt," Ye said.

He joined 798 Arts Space when he was in Beijing and started to create his first project of performance art. In October 2001,he finished his first work - Repairing the Great Wall Of the Ancient Qi Kingdom.But it did not attract many people. However,Ye did not give up creating projects of performance art. In April and May last year, his most successful and controversial project was released - he built up a large bird's nest in Jianwai SOHO of Beijing and stayed in it for one month without talking to anybody.

"It was the first project of my Urban Surviving Experience series. This series of Wandering artist finds his own way to live projects is just the reflection of my understanding for my earlier days," he said.

Ye said his childhood was rather miserable and unfortunate - he spent his childhood in the rural area of Shandong Province and once drank pesticide by mistake, which almost killed him. He was also involved in a terrible traffic accident, but he survived.His father was a doctor, and Ye would often visit his hospital,where he witnessed death many times. All of these things scarred his memories.

After he became a vagrant, he suffered from all kinds of difficulties - he often went hungry.

"When I went to Beijing, I thought that all those tribulations had gone. But I gradu-ally found that I was wrong. Those things that had tortured me in other cities began to torture me in another way. I found that most people suffered from confusion about their lives, including me. I tried to reveal such confusion in my own way," he said.

After the first project of his Urban Surviving Experience series was finished,he had to face criticism along with the praise.

"Actually, I respected all people, including those who criticized me. But for those people who had insulted me, I felt sad and disappointed because they unveiled the
dark side of humanity for me," he said.

But Ye did not stop the series, and set up the large wooden cage in Jiujiantang in Pudong.

With a volunteer from Beijing, he spent 11 days in the cage.

"This project was rather successful,many people said they understood what I wanted to express."

Ye will carry out the next project of this series in Qingdao on September 23, when he will stay in a cage in the city's zoo with a young lion.

"I think it will be a good project," Ye said."I don't have any great ideals about future. I only dream that in the future I can always drink with my close friends, I can always watch beautiful girls on the streets,and one hundred years after I die, still there will be some kind girls who read my poems on their balconies," he said.