+ Wang Jian Wei in Conversation with Hans Ulrich Obrist

HUO: Could you please tell me about the beginning of your work?

WJW: From 1975 to 1977, at the end of the Cultural Revolution, there was a movement encouraging young people to move to the country and work in the fields.So I ended up spending those two years on a farm and that's when I took up oil painting. The real change in my work took place between 1985 and 1987: I hardly painted at all, but I read a lot of books on Western literature and philosophy. That way I discovered Western history and culture, but most importantly I discovered my own history, which had been pretty much glossed over in the education I had been given.

HUO: What did you read in particular?

WJW: The books that influenced me most were by the Existentialists-Sartre and Camus-and Borges. Three writers who really left their mark on me. Beiween 1987 and 1990 I tried to use oils to get a more conceptual message across, but in 1991 I realised that this was very difficult, if not impossible.

HUO: Is that when you took up video?

WJW: Not quite. I started reading again: this time scientific works-Bohr, Einstein, etc-that radically altered my relationship to art and totally changed the way I work. The result was my first work Accident, Process, State, which has to do with time as process; finishing that work called for ten metres of preliminary drawings. My first video dates from 1995 and was part of an installation using a screen, a monitor and a mobile. Up until 1996 all my video pieces were incorporated into installations.

Production, my first video work completely independent of an installation, dates from 1997. I chose seven cities and in each one of them a public place, a meeting place, which became the theme of each part of the film. What I was interested in here was space, language and the social urges that can lead people into these different places-places which, for me, are traditional venues for passing on information and can be compared to today's media. The theatre is another one of these venues. I also worked on the theatre with Chang Yung Ho and, as in Production, the images I drew from theatre presentations reflect a sociological point of view. When I make this kind of image I don't necessarily see myself as an artist: I can change identity and, as in the case of those videos or my work on the theatre, I consider myself more a sociological observer. It's important that my work should be experimental.

HUO: Could you tell us about the ARC exhibition?

WJW: There the interest lay for me in the relationship between people and space and the reciprocal relationship between private and public space. The spaces that most attract my attention are theatres and squares, or agoras. For two years now l've been filming squares and people and projecting the images separately.

The resultant disparity is very interesting. Inside a theatre I'm trying to get at the relationship between the audience's imaginary world and its daily life. Problems to do with space have been a feature of my work for years and I'm pursuing that line of investigation in the ARC exhibition.

by Hans Ulrich Obrist