Wang Jianwei

DVD: signed in Pinyin and numbered 1/5
Betacam tape: signed in Pinyin, titled in English, dated 2007, and numbered 1/5

Acquired directly from the artist by the present owner

China, Shenzhen, OCAT, Symptom-Wang Jianwei Solo Exhibition, 2007-2008
China, Beijing, Ullens Center for Contemporary Art, OUR FUTURE: The Guy & Myriam Ullens Foundation Collection, 19 July – 12 October 2008

Thirty Years of Adventures, Timezone 8, China, 2010, p. 134

These work are generally in good condition.
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Vignette Two: From Interaction to Shifts in Context

In a thematic essay on video art written for the Ullens Center, I present a timeline of the evolution of the medium and attempt to place the art in art history. Aside from concept and form, I also discuss video in terms of its relationship with its historical context and other media. The increasing richness of video art is directly related to the emergence of everyday media. Any consideration of video art in its regional and cultural context requires an understanding of video as a medium. What does the author gain from this perspective?

The French intellectual Guy Debord (1931-1994) in his Society of Spectacle of 1967 diagnosed the state of mass confusion and terror towards the omnipresence of spectacles in the world of media. This state has not appeared in video art. Nam June Paik’s (1932-2006) Digital Superhighway,¹ a television installation based on a map of the United States, is a salute to the digital world. His use of new media is not only avant-garde, but also based on sensitive observations of everyday life and hopeful about the future. This work transports a video recording into an observer’s perspective and generates multiple interpretative possibilities by straddling between artistic medias—between video art and photography, video art and installation, video art and performance. These inter-medial relations, manifested in space, encompass other realms of cognition and experience.

How do we understand and interpret an artist’s response to an emergent technology and reality at any given moment? Around the year 2000, Chinese art gradually transitioned from video art to new media. Its materials, techniques, and use of software likewise emerged from traditional video art.

Qiu Zhijie’s project The West (Lot 874) incorporates documents, interviews, notes, and brain scans to present an enormous scenario concretely through computer interaction. He uses the familiar software Powerpoint to create this complex interactive work, which thematizes painting, video, and text. Qiu’s method is to place the concept of “the West” and Chinese impressions of “the West” in conflict, presenting these issues in a formally seamless but pointedly argumentative manner. Qiu Zhijie’s work serves as a worthwhile case study on cultural reality. In 1999, he was thinking precisely about how to place his work in the on-going artistic revolution while also trying to resolve the conflict between Eastern and Western culture. His situation reflected the aspirations and struggles of contemporary Chinese art at large. The West can be considered the most quotidian work after Jiao Yingqi’s Super Characters (1995-1996), created with Word documents and drawing from office culture. The West maximizes the potential of software, making the viewer forget that this so-called “interactive work” is ultimately a simple PC. Qiu believes that the DV revolution of the late 1990’s was also a PC revolution. He has garnered enormous exposure of his work through a mastery of the potential of both software and hardware. When The West was exhibited at ICA in London, it clearly transcended any conventional definition of a “work of art”; this software-enabled “work” has infinite potential in expansion and can “run” on any PC through the sample interface of a computer mouse. It is an important synthesis of cultural issues, software art, and social sculpture.

Around 2000, as Shanghai artists were exploring art’s relationships to society and current affairs and its narrative possibilities. These issues emerged in film and video art. From Zhou Tiehai’s 1997 film Will/We Must to Yang Fudong’s A Strange Heaven (shot on film during 1996-1997), which debuted at the 2002 Documenta in Kassel, film and video art of the period narrated the stories of artists and youths in marginal places and cultural environments. This reflected the influence of cinema on art, as well as artists’ meditations on inter-media relations and mass communication. Narrative expanded video art and emerged in it in the quotidian form of television dramas. Film and video artists naturally began to explore narrative possibilities consciously, as in Lu Chunsheng’s The Curve Which Can Cough (2001) (Lot 877) and Yang Fudong’s Backyard—Hey! The Sun is Rising (2001). The shared concerns for urban landscape and individual existence manifest themselves in Lu’s work as a quiet study of the relationship between the individual and the collective, and in Yang’s as a song of youth and as fantastical quasi-memories of an era. In Lu Chunsheng’s work, narrative takes on a dispassionate tone, revealing the subtle mysteries of everyday life. Brothers Wright’s Fault (2002) (Lot 878) and the subsequent History of Chemistry series (2004-2006) may be seen as preludes to a long film. In their cinematography, narrative mode, reflexivity about the filmmaker’s own space and perspective, and unencumbered execution, these video works are above all about observation. Here thinking is a form of observation. In these works preceding a full-fledged narrative piece, the artist insinuates an impending epochal transformation.

Around 2000, contemporary Chinese art, including the emerging media art, underwent another transition. The transition began with Harold Szeeman’s invitation of Chinese artists to participate in the Venice Biennale in 1999. In 2000, Hou Hanru curated the Shanghai Biennial. In 2001, Hou Hanru, Fan Di’an, and Pi Li organized the group show “Living in Time”² at the Hamburger Bahnhof. These events broadened the space for Chinese artists and art forms; contemporary art was no longer about East-West dichotomies or regional self-legitimation. Other activities and realms of knowledge began to impact art, leading to the rise of sound, video, and new media art between the mid-1990’s and 2000.

Aside from narrative and political stance, it became possible for video art to mediate between concept, narrative, performance, and theatre. This is true in Wang Jianwei’s Symptom (Lot 872) and Dilemma—Three-Way Fork in the Road (Lot 873), created between 2006 and 2007. His work emphasizes the relationship between stage and backstage, the intervention of intellectuals, and the method of using mixed media. Beginning with Screen, which was commissioned by the Brussels Theatre Festival in 2000, Wang’s work has been infused with theatricality and its deconstruction in the form of performance art, experimental theatre, and new media experimentation. He attempts to incorporate philosophical ideas and macro-historical vocabulary into his art, as is evident in the aforementioned works. Symptom can be interpreted as a piece of theatre that translates Chinese history into images. Here he turns particular figures into iconic masks, neither satirizing the ambiguity of their political legacies nor elevating them to the status of heroes. His sensitive treatment of epochal changes, the relationship between individual collective, and the interaction between the stage and the image recalls Lars von Trier’s Dogtown (2003). Wang Jianwei has contributed a new type of video and media art—mixed-media theatre. His thematic interest in ambiguities is echoed by the indeterminate state of medium. Dilemma—Three-Way Fork in the Road is a tribute to traditional Chinese operas. Here the artist borrows key elements from the major regional Chinese theatrical traditions and introduces characters from various periods. By confusing time and space, he deftly addresses the conflict between an individual and his or her times. The two video works mentioned above should rather be considered two pieces of carefully choreographed theatre that exist in video form. 

by Li Zhenhua

1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nam_June_Paik

2 http://www.smb.museum/en/exhibitions/detail/living-in-time.html