Standing in the middle of Wang Jianwei’s main studio, an expansive 6,000- square-foot room with an arched ceiling that brings the structure to well over two stories in height, I feel as if I’m on the set of a science fiction movie.
I’m surrounded by several molded white plastic objects – large objects – some in the form of amorphic shapes with protruding tubes and mechanical equipment; some in the representational forms of capsules holding space-suited figures resembling humans. Lined up against one wall are four tall figures, wrapped mummy-like in sheets of plastic. Then there are the aliens – featureless, with limbs bent in severe poses. On another wall hang still photographs in a storyboard arrangement. All of these objects are from installations Jianwei has created to accompany his videos, some of which were undoubtedly produced in this building.
If it were not for these disparate elements that are inherent to Jianwei’s installations like Symptom and Hostage, he might simply be considered one of China’s most prominent “video” artists. Instead, he defies description.
“I use different mediums in my work and therefore, different associations are made between those mediums. I use film and video, theatrical performance, painting and sculpture. I’m not interested in any single concept of art. I studied painting for a long time but eventually I came to understand that art is not just about painting.”
Given how far many Chinese artists of his generation have come in defining their identity over the past 20 years, Jianwei is something of an exception in that he is still searching for ways to define contemporary Chinese art in general. In the process, he is literally inventing new systems and new approaches that integrate not only various mediums, but multiple disciplines such as sociology and anthropology.
Moving out of Jianwei’s studio and into a smaller attached storage room, he shows me several pieces of antique furniture that at first I identify as 1950s American industrial. However, he says this is a collection of Chinese Socialist furniture from the 1950s and 60s that he has been assembling for some time. I later learn that it was used in one of Jianwei’s installations entitled Distance inspired by The Monument to the Third International, a giant Constructivist tower conceptualized by the Russian avant-garde artist Vladimir Tatlin in 1917, but never erected.
I am impressed by Jianwei’s depth of knowledge about international art and the distinct position he himself holds within the Chinese art world (he was the first Chinese artist to be invited to exhibit at Kassel’s Documenta: has exhibited at both the Venice and Sao Paulo Biennale, and in 2008 was awarded a prestigious Foundation for Contemporary Art individual artist grant).
In late 2009, as we sat over tea in a small kitchen off his studio, I asked Jianwei what he believed was the biggest problem in defining contemporary Chinese art today. “Everything is about time. People are aware that artistically between the 1950s and the early 1980s China was closed to the outside world, but realistically, we were also closed internally. As late as 1983, we didn’t have information about art from the outside world and information about ourselves wasn’t even readily available. That was a difficult moment for us but exciting as well and it caused a lot of questioning and experimentation. When more books became available, I was surprised to learn certain things about my own culture! It actually provided a unique way to look at all art at that moment. However, over the past four or five years, I have heard critics talk about the problem of dealing with ‘Chinese’ art as if it is still so very different. You don’t hear them talk about other art, like German art, in the same way. It’s very awkward and unnecessary I think. Why should we be different from the rest of the world at this time in our history?”
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