+ Wang Jianwei
Material For Thinking

Wang Jianwei was born in China's Sichuan province in 1958 and obtained a masters degree in 1987 from China National Academy of Fine Arts in Hangzhou where he studied in the oil painting department. The spiritual and formal models for Wang Jianwei's painting-especially the painting which won him the National Gold Prize of the People's Republic of China-were pictures from the Soviet Itinerary School, such as The Morning when the Young Soldiers were Leaving by Surikov Vassiay and The Tracker on the River by Repin Ilya. Despite his background in oil painting, however, in 1990 Wang decided to give up painting-canvas and oil could no longer express his ideas.

Wang's transition from oil painting to installation, conceptualism and finally video, mirrors the larger developments in contemporary Chinese art. Wang's unusual experiments and intellectualism over the past ten years have led to his becoming one of the leading exponents of multimedia art in China. A recent highlight is Wang's experimental performance Ping Feng, 2000, in which he abandons simple storytelling, using an array of multimedia methods to rethink history. Although Wang's work has been shown in major exhibitions all over the world, his own thoughts about his art have scarcely been published in English.

Johan Pijnappel: Your installations from the mid-1990s resemble a laboratory for scientific experiments. How much did you follow rational or analytic models in your research?

Wang Jianwei: In my works such as Event-Process State and Text, I was trying a comprehensive approach which included the process of production and the way it would be comprehended. I hope there is not a 'complete art'. That is , we do not set the criterion of art in advance, and we are not sure if art can establish an open relationship with other common experiences such as science, knowledge and other subjects. There is a possibility of communication in the space of common public ground. This means experimental activities must concern cognition and the rules of art. I use some scientific concepts to form 'bi-relationships'; these are by way of investigating text, rules and process in my work. As these scientific concepts keep their physical and experiential features, can they be regarded as a factor in a process (or art)? When an event is opened, can it be read comprehensively? As art? As science?

Your refer to your point of departure in this period as the 'Grey system' Could you explain what this system is based on and what it means to your You can say I'm trying a 'middle state' work. 'Grey' is emphasised both conceptually and in the works. The so-called grey means the possibility of building some experience between black and white. I mean this in a metaphorical sense. For me the exhibition is not a closed circuit or complete; I am always sceptical of 'definite' principles.

Your videos and video installations of the last five years generally have a documentary style; they are a record of the quotidian life which is rapidly transforming China. Your leave the metaphor out to make way for neutral observations with almost no text. Why a neutral observation, free of any cultural or political tendencies and is such an approach actually possible?

Firstly, I don't take a definite standpoint, not even the 'middle stand'. For me, this prerequisite for starting my work does not exist at all. In my image and installations with what you call a 'documentary style', I continue my experimental attitude towards my work, an attitude towards relationships.

So from this point, I think my works in this period not only offer a kind of reading, but can also be regarded as a kind of performance. Images not only provide a comprehensive platform, but include the relationship between a public-space event and the code of an artist. The platform reduces the meaning of images. Various sequences and fragments lose their original meanings; the cause and effect of an independent text are cut off. There is no successful link between them, including the 'document' part. I don't prepare a strong space to put these visual materials together to make them look like a complete event. Instead, a strong scene without organising principles would become the fragment of daily life and ideology.

While video productions, especially those used in installations, are nowadays becoming shorter in length, your works are more than two-hours long. You also take considerable time with each production. For instance, for Living Elsewhere, 1999, you shot sixty hours of material. I don't hope to see a clear tendency in my works. You should be cautious when you show a certain completeness in art. In many video works I provide a 'site on the spot'; space and images connected with each other, not the linear result of an idea. The explicitness of description will make other relative factors die. I am willing to see that the incompleteness and non-extremeness are controlled by some force. So I'm trying a 'middle state' writing style. The scene is obscure. Maybe this is what you see as the 'middle-ness', or the documentary style. I don't believe there is a rule or basic form for video art. Many people ask me: 'Do you have works no longer than eight minutes?' Video art doesn't become a natural part of contemporary art just because of some technical features. I don't think there should be a self-evident standard for video art.

Quite a few of your works have been filmed in the countryside. You have even stated that "The real life is that of the farmers'. What does the countryside mean to you compared with the rapidly growing urban Beijing in which you live?

It is easy to distinguish the border between cities and the countryside in China, but it is difficult to do so culturally. On the one hand, because of the political movements in China, the development of culture has a strong ideology, but lacks continuity. On the other hand, Chinese cities expand very quickly, with the borders between cities and rural areas interweaving. At the same time, floating populations create a very large unstable space, which has become the most typical feature of Chinese cities. This is a state of 'impurity'. They interweave with each other, invade each other and depend on each other. I hope to keep some of this impurity in my work.

What to you is the correlation between the individual and society?

The links between art and the outside world are not a simple realistic reflection, nor just your attitude towards a social phenomenon. Art should be alert when it faces the macro society. But in itself it is a micro interrelationship.

If we put what we call the public or an individual into a mobile relationship, there will be no definite borderline. There is a shared process. Take space, for instance. The difference between an individual and the public to a large extent lies in the concept of organisation. If the public loses the concepts of organisation and system, it becomes the raw material of knowledge, disappearing among many relations. I undertook an investigation of Chinese architecture in daily life from 1998 to 2000. I'm interested in the productive social relations provided by architecture, including the relationship between the public and individuals. I once wrote in an article:

Once architecture loses the borderline of definition, it will disappear among the elements of itself. These elements consist of the basic word of architecture, including the owner, the investor, land, the planning, permission, side A, construction workers, blueprint, models, construction engineering, fitting of the houses, contract material and so on. They disperse among the complicated relations, and the unseen parts of architecture. Because of the ambiguity of architecture, it plays an important role that cannot be replaced in contemporary culture. It helps us to understand the basic state of the society.1

The title of your first multimedia theatre work, Ping Feng, 2000, refers to screens. In daily life in China screens are used to divide inner and outer worlds. Reality is in this way divided into the visible and the invisible. What is the invisible in Ping Feng?

In China, screens (ping feng) are widely used in daily life. Whether in public or private spaces, a screen both divides and links a space. As an object, it combines an abstract concept with a tangible physical presence that is instrumental in utilising an interior space. The positioning or placement of a screen within a space results from both the reason for creating a divide between public and private-to block the view of a specific area of the space-and the need to conceal part of a room. At the same time, it serves as the link between the public arena and that portion of space that has been sectioned off. It creates two separate spaces that exist simultaneously within the same time frame. Screens are never used casually, as purely decorative devices. There is a science and a system behind the decision that determines their specific location. In this way, the two notions of division and linkage are made dependent on each other.

In an abstract sense, a screen alludes to a cultural attitude, to the desire to alter a space physically and temporally. The screen is evidence that the physical world can be altered and defined by the desires of men. The nature of that desire is shaped by a specific cultural ideology, which in turn shapes the character of a culture. Thus, it exerts a natural influence on daily life.

Ping Feng originated from the famous scroll painting, The Night Banquet of Han Xizai, by Gu Hongzhong, an artist of the Southern Tang period (943-975). In this painting Gu Hongzhong meticulously describes three individual screens, dividing the traditional scroll format into five separate areas. These areas are both divided from each other and linked via the same divisive screen. The painting was commissioned by the emperor Li Hounzhu-imperial name Li Yang-for political reasons not readily visible in the painting. Gu Hongzhong was asked to spy on the reclusive scholar-official Han Xizai and effectively provide a report on his nightly feasts, both the indulgences and the guests. The act of the painting was merely a guise. The result is a single painting with two very different interpretations. Was Gu Hongzhong an artist or a spy?

The gap between these two roles raised the questions on which Ping Feng is pivoted. In being asked to produce such a painting, Gu Hongzhong was required to enter into the event as a passive guest but an active observer who would ultimately record the facts of the matter for history. The record that the painting provides is not just a chronicle of the lifestyle and appearance of the people and their times, but it also offers a cryptic account of a hidden ulterior motive that hinged around an actual historical plot. The painting is thus a record of the actions of a broader group of people at that time beyond the physical boundary of the painting.

Ping Feng is based on an old chronicle, in contrast to your other works. Your motivation is quite unusual. You described it as: "In the past we used history to talk about today's situation. Now we should use history to doubt history.' Could you explain this?

The screen took its starting point as a series of hypotheses. It supposes that the painting has disappeared; that the emperor commanded an investigation into its disappearance, demanding its return; that in order to validate the facts of the painting, proof was required of the actual existence of the painter Gu Hongzhong.

These suppositions assume that the painting The Night Banquet of Han Xizai presents historical facts. Yet the circumstances under which it was commissioned offer the possibility of re-reading history. Within such a screen, within the relationship between men in an undefined time and place, the performers and the audience, there is no discernable or clear boundary between text or yesteryear and the performance in the present. They intertwine and manipulate each other, being at the same time interdependent and discriminating. They simultaneously define each other.

The sense of uncertainty to which this gives rise further serves to discredit the idea that there is but one absolute reading of history. The theatre that unfolds on stage is but a space where the different interpretations of language and experience clash. History is no longer tied to one image of a specific time. It is made to embrace both the record and all the events surrounding the painted account. It allows for each individual interpretation.

The unfolding of the screen is an anthropological study of history and tradition, a study in reading the self. Wittgenstein said that often the most important facts are obscured by the familiarity of simple things. There is nothing more familiar than reading a historical event that occurred a thousand years ago. But we should not let the familiarity of accepted fact deter us from asking what has been obscured.

by Johan Pijnappel
Art Asiapacific