PROFILE: WANG JIANWEI
: : Binghui Huangfu
: : printable
version
Wang Jianwei can only be described as an
enigmatic artist. He is arguably one of the three or four most
important artists
to emerge from China since the Open Door policy of the late 1970’s
and has built up an extraordinary body of work. Like most contemporary
artists in China, Wang began his career as painter, but abandoned
that medium in favour of more direct expressive forms.
Wang Jianwei has resisted the enormous pressures
that governed many of the first generation of artists practising
contemporary art in China. He is an important figure in that, among
Chinese artists, he was one of the few who remained concerned with
communicating to his own countrymen, regardless of the official
obstacles aimed at restricting contemporary expression. It is worth
noting that contemporary art in China has only had brief periods
of official acceptance. As a result, most of today’s well-known
Chinese contemporary artists have built their careers on external
international audiences.
The strategies employed by Wang are as fascinating
in their conception and planning as they are in their realisation.
He is not an artist concerned with expressing “messages” or “truths” to
his audience. His work is typified by what appears to be lucky accidents.
These accidents are essential to the power of the work, and it is
not until one takes a broad overview of his career that the apparently
fortuitous can be seen not as chance but as the result of meticulous
planning.
One famous untitled early work typifies Wang’s
approach. In a climate of bans on contemporary art, this piece
was supposedly carried out as a community project to restore a
statue of Mao. The work involved convincing local officials that
a statue of Mao in the city square of Chengdu required cleaning.
With local official support in place, the statue was duly scaffolded
and work began. The scaffolding, however, was covered in advertisements
for western multinational products such as Coca Cola. Eventually,
the cleaned and rejuvenated Mao was seen to emerge from the beneath
the consumerist trappings of the new China. This work was not acknowledged
by Wang Jianwei as a contemporary art piece, but was rather left
for those who pondered what they had seen or been involved in to
form their own interpretation.
|
|
Spider, stills from digital video (2004).
Courtesy of the
artist
Ceremony 2003
Ceremony 2003
|
|
His progression through various
expressive forms has led Wang Jainwei to describe himself as a
multimedia artist. His current practice consists of combinations
of theatre, film and new media. “Ceremony” (2003),
a large scale work presented at the Pompidou Centre in Paris last
year, was a complex blending of live performance, sound and eerie
projected film sequences. His most recent work “Spider” (2004)
involved penetrating China’s central internet control centre
in order to film a performance focusing on the blurred boundaries
between perpetrators and victims of systemic control.
In many ways Wang Jainwei’s multi-layered
avant-gardism demonstrates a characteristically Chinese approach
often overlooked by foreign audiences. He belongs to an old tradition
of Chinese expression that does not see a separation between art,
society, responsibility and progressive thinking.
Binghui Huangfu is Director of the Asia Australia
Art Centre in Sydney. |
