+ Signs of Life

Wang Jianwei, who lives and works in Beijing, enjoys fine analysis towards life space and cultural discourse. His concepts are deeply influenced by the public space, the concept of Jurgen Habermas, a German philosopher. Wang Jianwei applies the methodology of knowledge summation into the artistic practice, and intends to insert vitality into art through this methodology. His idea reflects his sociological analysis between literature resources and image resources. For example, his video works, I and Us? and Living in Other Space, both have the connotations of Chinese Feng Shui (literally, wind and water)5,which indicates some cultural and ecological implications. His works describe the changes from rural traditional architecture to urban modern skyscrapers, from private space to public space in cities, from popular commercial advertisements to urban express ways, from private behaviour to public communal manners, from humans to events, from identification of symbols to the person. The symbols he applies establish a complementary relationship between image resources and socialized behaviour.

His medium is characteristic of the features of documentaries which deliver the relationship between art literacy and entropy, and create a rich discourse and vivid site among artistic concepts, human behavioural principles and social norms. His ideas are brand new in that he poses doubt about the current artistic concepts, and he does not start from being an artist, nor from any vocabulary generated by artistic reasons. Instead he is immersed in the cultural and biological structure of human existence, and his work directly affects public cultural discourse. In the course of the coexistence between concepts and behaviour, the discourse is transformed into the overlapping of the popular culture and individual language.

The distinctive artistic forms not only depend on creating witty methods, but also more importantly, on discovering something which the image resources could not control and manipulate outside of the colourful contents. On the other hand, analysing the homogeneity of superficial symbols to expose a hidden and horrible uniformity is a critical philosophical way of thinking, characteristic of delving into something invisible to find something visible. Meanwhile, it elaborates the imbalance between different regions and cultures, namely between city and city, city and countryside, man and man, advanced and backward, false and truthful, people and nature, the human being and the varieties of cultural issues in this modernization trend. For example, Wang describes a scenario: in the open square of a city, an advertisement board blocks the view of a government building. In order to show the national emblem of the building, a hole is pitched out, an action motivated by both the commercial interests and symbolic political interests. This work satirizes the relationship between political symbols and commercial symbols.

It is apparent that social space and symbols highlight the discourse of desire for political power, possibly revealing a latent transformation between social structure and ideology. Popularity and change, symbol and deconstruction, observation and feeling, recording and processing are transformed into the collective of visual forms. In terms of social development, an individual must realize the mutual constructive relationship between social macro-tendency and individual creativity.

By means of social investigation, recording, analysing, selecting and processing, Wang Jianwei aligns the individual into the mobile and equal relationship between continuity and discontinuity. He consciously investigates into the image and idea resources to demonstrate the impact of the information site on human behaviour, individuality, and spirit, which are surrounded by all varieties of cultural discourse. In between the individual and public space, image and language, viewers can contemplate on the complex connotations and social implications after sifting through these images.

by: Huang Du