+ Wang Jian Wei: Public Space, Private Space

The Chinese will soon be sending a man into space; but that's of no more interest to Wang Jian Wei than the 2008 Peking Olympics, the 2010 Shanghai World Fair, the train that runs on magnetic cushions or any of the futurist follies that are keeping China (or two or three of its cities) in a state of permanent excitement and the rest of the world breathless with admiration. Wang Jian Wei is interested in public squares, apartments, sociey, people. Public space and private space.

These are the issues that form the focus of his art-of his videos, installations, shows and everything he does.

Observation.

Obsession.

He's been filming city squares for four or five years now, observing what goes on there and finding real food for thought. All those people, going about their business or just taking a break.

He likes to point out that as in a lot of other countries, these squares were built in the 1960s for political reasons: for parades, rallies, speechmaking. In the years that followed those motives gradually slipped into the background, and the squares with them. The movement got under way again in the 1990s, but this time the squares were different: lawns you weren't allowed to walk on, apparently with no real function-or only the vague one of symbolishing the city whose centre they occupied. The trouble is that they all look alike.

To put them there the authorities tore down houses, whole buildings. But, asks Wang Jian Wei, what's the point if they're all the same? True: if that's the case, what symbolic power do they have?

Armed with an attentive eye and his camera, Wang Jian Wei goes out onto these squares and homes in on people: a girl waiting for a bus with a bunch of flowers in her hand, a flute-seller playing his way through the crowd. And he catches the things that usually go unnoticed, unshown: men and women locked in their private worlds, pursuing some inner vision, surrounded by people they're not even aware of.

That's what really strikes me about this artist.

That attentiveness.

And the reflection that comes afterwards. Not the opposite.

The first time I met Wang Jian Wei in Beijing-it's hard to express this-I was uncomfortable with some of the images in the videos he showed me. They brought too many things back to me: that marvellous plastic bag, for instance, floating and floating through the air with the camera tracking it, just like in American Beauty-where the shot already looked like a quote from Scorsese. My unease got in the way of the rest and maybe spoiled that initial meeting. I didn't see much else that day.

Wang Jian Wei himself I found impressive and charming. In addition to what he actually revealed, he radiated something indefinable.

But there was something else again, at the opposite extreme, something belonging to the most secret part of him; something l've only found, in China, among people who have been through the Cultural Revolution and horrors that we, here, still have no notion of. I can only call it a kind of dead zone in the eyes and the skin, something not even the smile brings to life.

I'm glad to say there were other meetings, in Beijing, Sao Paulo for the Biennale, and elsewhere. So I was able to speak further with him, discuss this and that, even if sometimes a bit unsubtly-a problem I think has to do with translation and the way it so often oversimplifies. I remember an exchange on new media, which left him surprised at the possibility of being able to debate with such passion and conviction. skipping most of the polite precautions; each of us with well thought-out points to make, but putting them bluntly, without any of the usual window-dressing. As we parted he told me he had really appreciated this frank, direct way of exchanging ideas; but that it had astonished him as well.

For my part, I had been led to realise what was irreplaceable and unique in his work.

To grasp the subtle attentiveness of its focus on existence in terms of everything that escapes the societal and everything that leads back to it.

At that time it was being said that Asian artists were busy copying from America and Europe, lifting holus-bolus without too much idea of what was actually happening.

Was there some truth in this?

And if so, what exactly?

When Wang Jian Wei's two face to face videos made a great impression at the FIAC in Paris, on display in a sort of video-dominated no man's land, some French commentators alluded to Shirin Neshat: "Yes, well, maybe the guy's not bad, but two videos face to face, Shirin Neshat's already done that..."

To which the reply is simply that there are also al lot of painters around who put brushstrokes side by side; and that what distinguishes one from another is the style and not the use of any particular technique or equipment.

I've known Asian artists who copy fashionable Americans and Europeans; but I'd like to point out that I've also met French-and American-artists with no qualms about doing the same. We know who those artists are and either we don't show them at all or we show them in full cognisance of the situation. Why exhibit Asians who copy and then criticise them for it? Puzzling and perverse, no?

Can we only imagine an Asian artist as someone who copies or is otherwise derivative? As a sub-artist, in other words?

When I saw what was being shown in Germany and the UK a few years ago and visited studios there, it was clear to me that plenty of (not to say all) European curators were basing their choices on some kind of pre-established image. So where was the copy? First and foremost in the heads of the people doing the choosing.

It's often the case that artists from distant countries reach us here via the biennales, those reassuring filters that produce sanitised "discoveries". This is why I'm going on so much: nothing can replace roaming from one studio to the next, making surprise discoveries, being given one artist's recommendation of another. Meeting Wang Jian Wei the way I did-practically a struggle at first, followed by a fresh meeting on the other side of the world, then back in Beijing again, and getting to know the artist better as I went along: a little detail here, a breakthrough there-is completely different from arriving back from Gwangju, Venice, Sao Paulo, Sydney or Kassel with some kind of souvenir in your luggage and another artist's name in your notebook.

The public and the private, then, that's the kernel of the work of this artist so little shown in France: there was Connection at the FIAC and at Claudine Papillon's gallery; and before that, the works featuring in Cities on the Move, in Bordeaux in 1998, then in Biarritz in 2000. The public and the private then: that's what we see taking shape here at the ARC, in a space reminiscent both of a theatre and the public arena. With screens.

Why this fascination?

Why this questioning?

Why this specific focus?

The explanation, if we really need one, lies partly in Wang Jian Wei's personal history, in his development, in those doubtless incommunicable experiences that simultaneously nourish the work and shape his existence.

He himself is quite emphatic: "Video is just a technique. Everything depends on the artist and how he uses it to say what he has to say. And there's a close connection between what he says and his body, his ideas and, above all, his culture."

To say that Wang Jian Wei's family lacks an artistic side would be a gross understatement.

His parents are in the army.

Little Jian Wei, begins drawing and painting.

Great. He likes staying home to draw in peace? Better still. At least that way he won't be hanging around the streets like a lout.

That's how they see it, anyway.

On graduating from high school he was, as the lady interpreter discreetly put it, sent into the countryside as an "educated young person". This was towards the end of the Cultural Revolution.

Typical communist early life. Typical communist upbringing. No contact with tradition, no knowledge of anything to do with the West. For him that's where the fundamental break came-what Austrian novelist Thomas Bernhard has called "a decision": in addition to the duties he shared with the other "educated young persons", he kept on with his painting and drawing. Not all that easy with the exhaustion due to hard physical work and a psychological depletion that was no less ruinous. "At the time," he told me," I didn't realise what I was doing; but now, thinking back, I feel it was already a personal choice. I was proving I could make a choice even in those circumstances."Doesn't sound like much, seen from here; over there it was equivalent to joining the Resistance.

This was an appalling period in China.

Everything was in short supply, in material, intellectual and spiritual terms. A lone figure, Wang Jian Wei was desperately worried by a personal future he had no power over. His fate would be decided by the untutored peasants who ran things.

To keep on painting, then, was to go deliberately counter to that absence of choice.

In spite of everything.

He would spend two years thus, in two parallel worlds: the public space where he worked with the peasants and the private space of painting, a near-absurd oasis in a world that denied all privacy.

Obviously traces of this state of mind can be detected when, on those squares, he films the people mentioned earlier: people in the midst of the crowd but somehow cut off from it.

Having parents in the army, though, meant he was not too badly treated. he was told, "In the country painting serves no purpose; so we'll find a way of letting you use your skills in the army."

That's how he came to spend six years drawing ordnance maps.

That was twenty-two years ago, the artist comments with a faint laugh.

He's now forty-four.

When he left the army to become a "freelance painter", he was only making the most of his situation. He studied and painted. He read voraciously: Western philosophy, sociology. In1985-87 China began to open up to the West. Wang Jian Wei describes himself as a sponge, absorbing, absorbing. He kept on reading, to the exclusion of almost everything else.

His reading led him to look into the history of his country, to rediscover traditional art and the frescoes painted inside caves. He too was painting at the time. In oils and in the Soviet manner; realistically.

With so much reading and thinking behind him, he now had only a single need: to express his thoughts and ideas in painting. He worked at it for two or three years, feeling his way. Then had to admit himself beaten.

He was finished with painting. Tried a little conceptual art. A little body art. Some installations. Then video.

Wang Jian Wei came to video in 1995.

That was the revelation. Success: the fit between an idea a way of living and form.

Form: the big, tough question. Remember Goethe's remark:"Everyone can see the subject; the content is clear only to those who make it their business; but form is a mystery for almost everyone."

Wang Jian Wei makes no bones about it: in addition to what he has already achieved in his chosen field, he is looking for a new form and a new language for video. The tall partitions he installs in the exhibition space-like"separated individuals", as he puts is-are a first step towards the realisation of his dream. His multimedia pieces, with their actors and projection onto fabrics, represent an opening-out towards something also deeply in need of this same first step.

He has already achieved something remarkable with Connection and this installation set opposite two display units. One of them shows families sitting on more or less the same kind of sofa in more or less the same poses, with the same objects to hand on a low table. They are totally absorbed in what they are watching: a TV screen. The screen itself is showing DVDs that include a montage by Wang Jian Wei himself.

He had been to see three families and asked what DVDs they were watching. The DVDs were all alike-mostly big-budget American movies with two basic themes: violence and love. So he collected thirty of the DVDs and used them to assemble a single film about the violence and love they portrayed.

Earlier he had filmed a new building and the people who had just moved in: three families-the same people he had already filmed as they sat watching TV. The first family told him they were going to decorate their home to make it different from the others, so he set about filming the apartment with all its furnishings, household appliances and knick-knacks. Going into the second apartment, he heard the same thing: it's going to be done up to look original, really different. In both cases he pins down the conformism, the similarity, the way both match a model. Here we're not so far removed from Boltanski-but above all, we're right in there at the core of Wang Jian Wei's art, founded as it is here on a report that is neither ideological nor sociological, just highly perceptive.

Contact with a third family confirmed his initial impression. "When you come down to it," he says" no one wants to live like other people, but everybody's alike. Maybe private space has already become public space. Deep down there's no difference."

He returned to the same theme for two weeks' filming of the crowd on Tiananmen Square, where everybody poses in front of the Gate and makes the same gesture for the camera, a kind of two-finger V.When he asks them why, nobody knows: "Everybody is doing it, so I am doing it too"is the universal reply. Wang Jian Wei reminds us that the Chinese are afraid not to be like everybody else; if they're out of line they feel somehow threatened.

Can this slippage be resisted?

Of course. Nothing in this field is ineluctable.

Fortunately, in Wang Jian Wei's opinion, reality is not logical.

"In my work," he says," I cut logic short, so as to inculcate mistrust of anything too convincing, too natural."

Deconstruct, he says.

Wang Jian Wei, breaking into reality.

Breaking into the societal.

Breaking in.

by Michel Nuridsany