Performance artists have a long, painful tradition of injuring and mutilating themselves in public. To pull two examples from the 1970s-a particularly violent decade-there's Chris Burden getting shot in the arm and Marina Abramovic slicing her bare skin with a razor. These risky acts weren't just shock theatre. For viewers, they also raised uncomfortable questions about their own appetite for human suffering.

Local artist David Khang is one of six participants in Slits 2: Pain Is in the Eye of the Beholder, this Saturday (February 25) at the Western Front. Like Burden and Abramovic, the hard-bodied Khang will attempt to share his pain with a live audience. But instead of a gun or a blade, he'll be using a motorized cow tongue.

"The main curatorial intent behind this was to challenge artists to see if they could convey the essence of pain without penetration of the skin," Western Front performance curator Victoria Singh tells the Georgia Straight by phone. According to Singh, pain can be an interface through which people reach a collective understanding. "So it's up to audiences to decide: 'Is this an act of pain? Do I feel this pain? Am I engaging in this artist's process and feeling pain, feeling this interface of pain through their actions?'"

Throughout history, physical anguish has been popular entertainment, from Roman gladiatorial combat to public beheadings to the recent Saw movies. Singh finds it ironic that the same rules don't apply to watching someone in a state of pleasure. "If I was to say to you, 'I feel your pleasure,' that then takes it into an area that's almost like phone sex."

Slits 2 cleverly plays on both the voyeuristic impulse to observe others' pain and the metaphor of skin as a locus of empathy. Singh has placed the artists in separate plastic "tents", and viewers must peer through slashes in the fabric.

Within, they'll see Archer Pechawis perform a piece that may deal with murdered Native prostitutes, and Naufus Ramirez-Figueroa using various props to push the boundaries of bodily sensation. Speaking of props, Singh hasn't heard what Khang will do with his cow tongue. She's also reluctant to reveal too many details of the event, given that performance artists often don't realize their works until the last minute. However, it is clear that Faithful by Lois Klassen will incorporate text from Cuban-born artist and physicist Enrique Martí­nez Celaya. And Heidi Nagtegaal spent months stitching Knit, a 5.5-kilogram mass of black tubing that explores the obsessive nature of anxiety.

Germany's Helge Meyer will appear via video in a 2001 piece called Clash. Filmed in China, this meditation on rapid cultural change shows Meyer and a colleague using ropes to drag heavy bricks until their hands are cut to ribbons.

Singh notes that spectators can never truly identify with such apparent torments: what's agony to one person can be a source of intense pleasure for somebody else. "And yet there's a popular view when it comes to pain that it is this way that we can communicate and commune as human beings," she says. "But can we ever really know that? Because it does remain something that's very deeply personal."

Bearing that in mind, it won't hurt to go take a look on Saturday night. Or will it?