+ Wang Jianwei

The neighborhood is nondescript, north side of town, a forest of crumbling prefab towers barely enlivened by the paint applied for visiting International Olympic Committee judges. The only sign of playfulness in this landscape is the 80s-era minorities theme park nearby, with its papier-maché Tibetan temples. This is Beijing pre-Starbucks, the Beijing of gray days and brown coal.

Unlike some of China’s art elite, Wang Jianwei doesn’t drive a German car, parked in one of the capital’s many nouveaux-riches tract developments. He still lives in a modest apartment not far from the art academy, with dim, unpainted corridors and an attendant seated at a wooden desk inside the elevator. When he answers the door, a few moments pass before he appears, dressed casually in a “Brazil” football shirt; he locks himself in from the inside.

Wang is the great iconoclast of China’s heroic age of avant-garde artists, those who emerged in the 1980s. Unlike Fang Lijun, who embraced the commercialism of the new “new China”, or Ai Weiwei, who (reluctantly) accepted a role as the path-breaker for the next generation, Wang remained stubbornly individualist, solitary and cerebral in a China which above all values sociability and sensuality. “Most [Chinese artists] don’t pay attention to what’s here,” the critic Hou Hanru explains, pointing to his temple, “but on the taste in their mouth.” Their work is often powerfully emotive, Hou feels, but all too often “lacks solitude… the solitude needed for deeper understanding.”

Wang putters about his living room, making tea. He is genial, even courtly, but clearly has little interest in typical Beijing small talk — the jokes, the gossip. His conversation is littered with references to figures like Piaget. He is virtually alone among Chinese artists in focusing on abstract issues of knowledge and cognition, rather than the body, pain, personal memory or satire.

“You can’t arrive at a knowledge of reality via one theory or one ideology,” Wang says. He says he wants to “integrate knowledge” and communicate the interrelationship between art, science and other vehicles for experiment. As he sees it, it’s a struggle against the false notion of “linear understanding”.

“Maybe this world has no meaning,” he adds. “But that means more possibilities.”

Wang Jianwei was born in Sichuan in 1958. In 1975, towards the end of the Cultural Revolution, his education was interrupted when he was “sent down” to the countryside. From 1977 to 1983 he served in the military, nearby Beijing. He then returned to Chengdu, where he worked in a factory and the local art school. With hard work he was able to get admission to the China Art Academy in Hangzhou, China’s most prestigious, where he graduated in 1987.

“I felt my life was broken off,” he says. “I was thirty when I left the army. My whole experience had to be discarded. I had to learn everything anew.”

“When I was in the countryside, life was really dull. Remember, no TV, no movies, no magazines. Not even any books. I had to find something to do. Art was like a drug, a resistance to that boredom. But only when it was raining could I stay home and paint. There was no electricity, so I had to make a hole in the thatched roof for light. I started by painting ginger flowers.”

“Our education was kind of colonial, implanted in our minds from an early age. The teachers knew only the Russian style. When we weren’t busy at the harvest, we would try to find poplar trees, like in Russian paintings. The teachers would make clippings from magazines of Russian-style paintings.”

Then came the 1980s. “Suddenly we had all this influence from the West — not only art but also literature, philosophy. Like most people, it took almost all my energy just to absorb all this new information from outside our world.

Wang first tried to apply his new ideas to the Russian-style realism he had been taught. As a result, he became well-known as a proponent of so-called “Scar” painting. He even won a national prize. But after 1990, his work changed radically. In a sense his personal development mirrored the larger direction of Chinese art, from Socialist Realism to a rather simplistic humanism and finally towards a sophisticated but very local form of conceptualism. In the most literal terms, Wang went from the easel into the laboratory, producing a series of works that claimed art as a form of experimental knowledge.

“After I graduated the Academy,” Wang says, “Zheng Shengtian [then the dean] tried to attract artists like me as teachers. But I couldn't help but find it ridiculous to set up models for students to emulate. When I made ‘Documents’ (1992), my intention was to subvert the methods of teaching art.” He digitally spliced together unrelated ordinary materials. “I wanted to subvert the idea that only something of visual significance can enter a work of art.” He continued with “Events-Process-Status” (1993), a “laboratory” for “a new methodology for creating art”. This was later included in Hans-Ulrich Obrist and Barbara Vanderlinden’s seminal exhibition “Laboratorium” in Antwerp.

“For me, it’s all about problems of cognition,” Wang says. “I see it as a struggle, not between people, but between different forms of knowledge. There are other possibilities of understanding an object. So I create new models. Of course, the result may not be ‘beautiful’, or even recognizable as art.”

“Sometimes you have to accept people will not understand what you are trying to do. A journalist once asked me, ‘why make art if you don’t make money from it?’ I told him, ‘My job is to make mistakes.’”

“Every time I embark on something new, I’m not sure what the results will be. So I make mistakes. And then more mistakes.”

Wang’s concerns are not purely epistemic. Like many in China, he is fascinated by China’s development, particularly its dystopian aspects. “Beijing is a city full of desire,” he says. “But it doesn’t really know what it wants. It’s based on a very superficial idea of modernity, on the ambition to surpass the West. We don’t care about how comfortable we are, how to live a better life, but how high our buildings are, how massive our cities are. It’s kind of a mania.”

“After 1949, those who controlled China were basically of peasant origin. They relied on their own experiences to modernize the cities. A central square, some buildings around it, whether or not they have any function. If you go to the countryside, you find many villages which imitate this structure — many little Tiananmens. They are imitations of something originally built by peasants in imitation of what they believed cities to be. Nobody cares if it functions or works. They just care if it’s modern-looking or impressive.”

In the mid-1990s Wang started a series of video works which marked yet another new direction, eschewing the ontological speculations of the laboratory works for almost artless documentations of social issues. “I don’t walk in a straight line,” he says. “There’s no such thing as a universal practice.”

“Planting/Recirculating” (1995) attempted to “explore the artist’s relationship with society” documenting farmers growing new genetically-modified hybrids. “At first the farmers just watched the others. By the time they planted, four years later, the seeds were already exhausted. They started abandoning working the land, turning to highly polluting factories to survive.”

“Living Elsewhere” (1999) comprises sixty hours of material, a research into China’s “floating population” of itinerant laborers. Wang focused on an abandoned luxury villa development near Chengdu which had been taken over by landless peasants. “I took the title from Gilles Deleuze’s metaphor of modernity as a construction site—we don’t live here and now, we live elsewhere.”

In what has become a predictable pendulum swing, Wang moved away from these dry “scientific” works around the turn of the century to make forays into theater. Pingfeng or “Screens” was the first, staged in Beijing and, later, Brussels. “This work was one of the most fulfilling for me,” Wang says. “It concerned a painting, but it really began with a spy” — the famous Tang Dynasty painting “The Night Banquet of Han Xizai” was, as the story goes, the result of painter Gu Hongzhong’s investigations into reclusive scholar-official Han Xizai.

“The screen itself was crucial. It’s a uniquely Chinese architectural element — it can intervene and completely alter space. Even now, leaders stand behind a screen before they appear in public. This kind of screen is made in a meticulously beautiful style — but it hides things which are not so beautiful.” Screens divide space, but also link it — unlike the walls of the West.

Four screens on the set divided both time and space. Wang created fictional narratives that contradicted each other. “More than anything I thought of Wittgenstein when I created this piece,” Wang says. “He said important facts are obscured by the familiarity of simple things. And for Chinese, there is nothing ‘simpler’ than a historical event which happened a thousand years ago.”

More recently, Wang Jianwei staged another multimedia work falling somewhere between performance and theater. “Ceremony,” performed in Beijing, Paris and London in October 2003, tried, in typical Wang Jianwei style, to give several very subtle epistemological issues some concrete form: In this case, the relationship between “history” and “what actually happened.”

At the center of the piece is an anecdote from “The Three Kingdoms”, the medieval novel which is China’s most important cultural meta-narrative. The “real” events in question happened almost a thousand years earlier, after the collapse of the Han Dynasty. “Ceremony” focuses on Mi Heng, the archetypical “righteous scholar,” who was killed for challenging the hegemon Cao Cao. Wang Jianwei first disassociates the dialogue from the action on stage, interweaving several classical Chinese texts about Mi Heng and the “Three Kingdoms”. The result is a rumination on historical memory and political necessity.

The seeming discontinuity in Wang’s work hides a very consistent line of attack. Whether it is his early “machines”, the videos, or deconstructed theater pieces, Wang is trying to throw the notion of art as a form of communication back on itself, making failure of communication itself the core of the work. As an objective, this is legitimate but hardly unique. What makes Wang’s works fascinating is the eccentricity of his methods, an eccentricity which is inseparable from the experience of his generation of Chinese—those who have known both the isolation of Maoism and the Opening-Up. Painting in his Sichuanese hut, Wang could only dream of the wider world. But those dreams, transformed by his quirky imagination, made something far more interesting than some copied truth. You might call it “creative misinterpretation”.

The young in China never had to struggle to make sense of their world. Basically, it was handed to them — feel free to consume, just don’t question power. For Wang Jianwei, it was only through a long period of questioning that he was able to understand even his own mind. “Once you do away with boundaries and identities,” he says, “you have to discover yourself as an individual.”

There is a sense of loss that underlies the superficial iciness of Wang’s work, a restrained but unmistakable note of grief. Sitting in his flat as Beijing’s sad, gunmetal sky grows dim, none of it seems more poignant than “Connection”, a video installation exhibited in 2001 at “Your Home Is Mine” at the Samsung Museum in Seoul. “I filmed six families at home,” Wang says. “I asked them to sing karaoke, all titles popular at that time in China. The way they expressed love or violence was so similar you couldn’t tell where one began and the other ends. Each family sang of ‘their’ feelings; but what they ‘felt’ was exactly the same as millions of other people, in their ‘private’ space.”

Wang slowly unlocks the door to let us out, letting the key rattle loosely in the lock. He finally says, smiling wryly, “We all have our own form of prison.”

+ 汪建伟

这是一个没有什么特征的街区，坐落在城市的北边。一群还未发展的简陋的楼房，虽然为了迎接国际奥委会的官员而全部被重新粉刷过，却依然没有什么生气。这个环境中唯一有点趣味痕迹的，就是80年代修建的民族公园，里面有纸扎的西藏寺庙。这是星巴克之前的北京，是灰天黄土的北京。

与中国有些艺术界的精英不同，汪建伟没有停在首都最新最豪华的停车场内的德国车。他仍然住在一间离中央美院不远的公寓里，楼房的走道昏暗无漆，电梯的木桌后坐着个看门的人。他应了门铃后过了一会儿才出来，穿著巴西队的足球衫。进门后，他从屋里反锁上门。

汪建伟是80年代中国英雄主义的前卫艺术中，一个推翻偶像，打破旧习的人。他和方立钧不同，没有拥抱新的“新中国”的经济主义。他也和艾未未不同，没有（不情愿地）接受作下一辈的开路人的角色。在中国这个崇尚社交性和情感性的环境里，汪建伟顽固地保留着个人性，孤单性和头脑性。“许多[中国艺术家]不注意这里”，侯瀚如指着自己的太阳穴说，“却只注意他们嘴里的味道”。他认为他们的作品往往在感情上强烈有力，但却“缺乏独立性… … 那种深层理解所需要的独立性。”

汪建伟在客厅里转悠，为我们沏茶。他很和蔼，甚至风度翩翩，但显然对北京流行的闲言碎语（比如笑话和八卦）没有丝毫兴趣。他的话语中参杂着对 Piaget这些人的引用。在中国艺术家中他确实与众不同，将注意力集中在一些比如知识和认知这些抽象问题，而不是身体，痛楚，个人记忆或嘲讽这些主题上。

“你不能从一个理论或一个意识型态中找到有关真实的知识”，他说。他想“综合知识”，以表达艺术，科学及其它试验手段之间的内在联系。对他来说，这是在与错误的“直线理解”这一概念作斗争。

“也许这个世界没有任何意义”，他接着说。“但这意味着更多的可能性。”

汪建伟1958年出生于四川。1975年文革快结束时，他被下放到农村，从而停止了学业。从1977年到1983年，他在北京附近参军。之后，他回到成都，在工厂和当地的艺术学校工作过。几年的努力使他考上了杭州美术学院，并于1987年毕业于这所中国著名的美术大学。

“我觉得我的生活被打断了”，他说。“我退伍时，已经快三十了。我必须抛弃以前所有的经历，从头开始学所有的东西。”

“我在农村时，生活很无聊。你要记得，那时没有电视，没有电影，没有杂志。甚至没有书。我必须找事做。艺术就像毒品一样，可以抵制那种空虚和无聊。但只有下雨时我才有时间待在家里画画。那里没有电，所以我只好在屋顶上挖个洞。我最先开始画的是姜花。”

“我们所接受的教育有点殖民主义的色彩，很小就在我们的脑子里扎下了根。老师只知道苏联的艺术风格。不农忙的时候，我们就会找苏联绘画中的白杨树。老师还会从杂志上剪下苏联风格的照片。”

然后就是80年代。“突然，我们有了各种各样的西方的东西——并不仅仅是艺术，还包括文学和哲学。和许多人一样，吸收这些外面世界的新信息花费了我所有的精力。”

最开始汪建伟将自己的想法用在学到的苏联现实主义中。他也因此成为“伤痕”艺术中的一个重要人物，甚至还得了国家大奖。但1990年后，他的作品发生了巨大的变化。从一定意义上看，他个人的发展是中国艺术在大方向上转变的写照，从社会现实主义到简明的人文主义，最后趋向于复杂成熟却又极度地方化的观念艺术。用最形象的话来说，汪建伟从画架走进实验室，制作了一系列宣称艺术是一种试验性知识的作品。

“我从美院毕业后，郑胜天（当时的教务主任）想吸引像我这样的艺术家作老师，但我却不由自主地认为，在学生面前放一些石膏让他们去模仿其实是一件极其可笑的事情。当我制作《文件》（１９９２）时，我的想法是去推翻艺术的教育模式。”他用计算机将毫不相关的普通图像连接在一起。“我想推翻这样一种思想，即只能从视觉震撼力的程度去判断一个艺术作品”。他接下来创作了《事件——过程．状态》（１９９３），一个“艺术创作新方法论”的“实验室”。这件作品后来在比利时安特卫普由Hans-Ulrich Obrist 和 Barbara Vanderlinden策划的展览《实验室》中展出。

“对我来说，这些都是有关认知的问题” ，汪建伟说。“我把它看成一种斗争，不是人与人之间的斗争，是知识的不同形式间的斗争。理解一个东西有很多种不同的可能性，所以我就去创造新的模式。当然，结果也许并不‘漂亮’，甚至不能被看作艺术。”

“有时候你必须接受其它人不理解你在做什么这个现实。一位记者曾问过我，‘搞艺术又不能挣钱，你为什么要做呢？’我告诉他，‘我的工作就是不断地犯错’”。

“每当我开始作一件新作品时，我并不清楚结果会怎样。所以我会犯一些错误，然后再犯更多的错误。”

汪建伟所关心的问题并不纯粹是知识性的。和中国许多其它人一样，他被中国的发展所深深吸引，特别是反乌邦托的那些层面。“北京是一个充满欲望的城市”，他说。“但它却不知道自己要什么。它建立在这样一个简单的想法上，立志于超过西方。我们并不在乎我们有多舒服，我们的生活方式是什么？但却在意我们的建筑有多高，我们的城市有多大。这是一种疯狂。”

“1949年后，统治中国的领导基本上都是农民出生。他们倚赖自己的经验来建设发展现代化城市。一个大广场，周围一些楼房，不管有用没有用。你如果去农村，会发现许多模仿这种架构的村子——许多小天安门。他们是在模仿由农民模仿修建的想象中的城市的样子。没有人在乎它能不能用。他们只在乎它看上去是不是现代或壮观。”

90年代中期，汪建伟开始制作一系列录像作品。这些作品也标志着他创作的一个新方向，即避开实验室作品中对存在论的分析和假设，转成几乎没有艺术性的对社会问题的记录。“我不走直线”，他说。“世界性的做法是不存在的”。

《种植／传播》（1995）试着“讨论艺术家与社会之间的关系”，记录农民种植新培育出来的嫁接植物。“开始农民们只是看其它人怎么作。四年后当他们开始播种时，种子已经烂了。他们于是开始放弃地里的活，转向对环境有很大污染的工厂以求生存。”

《生活在别处》（1999）包括60个小时的内容，是对中国打工“游民”的一次调查。汪建伟以成都附近遗弃后被无地农民占据的一群豪华住宅为作品对象。“我用Gilles Deleuze将现代性比喻作为一个“建筑与工地”作品的标题——我们不住在此时此地，我们生活在别处。”

在可以预想到的摇摆旋转中，汪建伟在世纪之交从这些枯燥的“科学性”的作品转向了对舞台的进军。《屏风》是他的第一个尝试，先在北京后在布鲁赛尔上演。“这件作品是我比较满意的”，汪建伟说。“它的主题是一幅画，但它实际上从一个间谍开始”。唐代著名绘画《韩熙载夜宴图》是画家顾闳中秘密查访隐居的士大夫韩熙载的结果。

“屏风是关键。它是一种特殊的中国建筑元素——它能干涉并完全改变空间。甚至今天， 领导人在露面之前，都会站在屏风后。这种屏风被精心地做成很漂亮的样子——但它却被用来遮掩并不太漂亮的东西。”屏风将空间分割，也同时连接空间——这一点与西方的墙很不一样。

舞台上四幅屏风划分时间和空间。汪建伟编排了相互冲突的故事情节。“我在创作这件作品时想的最多的是Wittgenstein”，汪建伟说。“他曾说重要的事实往往被对简单事情的熟悉而掩盖。对中国人来说，没有什么比一千多年前发生的历史事件更‘简单’了。”

最近，汪建伟上演了另一件界于表演艺术和舞台艺术之间的多媒体作品。《仪式》于2003年10月在北京、巴黎和伦敦上演。以汪建伟典型的风格，这件作品试着给非常细微的认识论上的问题一些具体的形式。在这个例子当中，就是“历史”与“实际发生”的事情之间的关系。

作品的中心是三国（中国文化中一个最重要的巨型中世纪小说）中的一个故事。“真正”的历史事件发生在一千多年以前汉朝灭亡后。《仪式》主要关注的是一个典型的正直的文人米衡。他在向曹操提出异议后，被这位暴君杀头。汪建伟首先将对话与舞台上的表演分离，将中国古典文献中几种不同的对米衡和三国的描写交织在一起。结果是对历史记忆和政治需要的深刻反思。

在汪建伟看似缺乏连贯性的作品中其实有一条连贯性的线，那就是攻击。无论是他早期的“机器”，还是录像或解构性的舞台作品，汪建伟都试着将艺术作为表达手段这一概念带回到其本身。作为一个目标，它是合理的，却不是独特的。汪建伟的作品因为其方法的古怪而引人入胜。这种古怪与他这一辈中国人的经历不可分割——他们懂得毛泽东统治下的孤立以及开放政策。在他的四川小茅屋里画画，汪建伟只能梦想着屋外的广大世界。但那些梦想被他离奇的想象力转换，变成了远比模仿的真实更有意思的东西。你可以称它为“富有创造力的误解”。

中国的年轻人从不需要为理解他们的世界而斗争。基本上，这已经拱手交给了他们——随便消费，但不要挑战政权。对汪建伟来说，他是通过长时间的挑战才明白自己的想法和观念的。“你一旦脱离了界限和身份”，他说，“你就必须从个人中理解你自己”。

汪建伟作品表面上的冷酷其实有一种失落的感觉，一种含蓄的但真实存在的感伤。坐在他屋内，看着北京铁黄而悲哀的天空，没有什么比《链接》更尖锐了。这件录像装置作品于２００１年曾在汉城的三星博物馆《你家是我家》展览中展出。“我拍摄了六个家庭在自己家里的情况”，汪建伟说。“他们唱卡拉OK，都是些当时在中国流行的曲子。他们表达爱和痛苦的方式非常相似，你根本分不清谁先开始，谁后结束。每一个家庭都在唱‘他们’的感受，但他们在自己的‘私人’空间里的感受，却和成千上万其它人一样。”

汪建伟慢慢地打开锁着的门，送我们出去。钥匙在锁里发出咯吱咯吱的声音。他最后说，脸上略带着奇怪的微笑，“我们都有自己的监狱”。