In a design outline at the beginning of 2000, Wang Jian Wei proposes making a completely new video installation containing three projections. Two of these are on both sides of a 'Ying Bi', a free-standing wall topped by roofing tiles. The third projection is on a hanging screen that he calls 'Ping Feng'. In the Xinhua Chinese dictionary, the word 'screen' (ying bi) is explained as a short visual block placed in front of, or just outside of, a door, or a decorative architectural structure. The word 'screen' (ping feng) in the same dictionary is explained by the word 'to conceal' (zhe dang), a concealing device. Screen: Screen (Ying Bi: Ping Feng) are both used in daily life in China, in both public and private spaces. A screen both divides and links a space. It is an extremely abstract concept. At the same time, it is a very physical presence that represents a highly distinctive object from Chinese history used to alter a living space. It is used to block the view of an object like a door, it functions also as an intricately beautiful decorative object.
Wang Jian Wei graduated from the China National Academy of Fine Arts in Hangzhou City in 1987, and as a talented oil painter, received the Gold Prize of the People's Republic of China. Chinese modern art had achieved a good deal of freedom in the eighties, artists believed in the revolutionary power of modern art, and international attention followed. Just two years later, this fresh cry for freedom was silenced once more. In the spring of 1989, the China/Avant-garde exhibition was closed twice and the student uprising that summer was ruthlessly put down. Wang Jian Wei felt the limitation of the two-dimensional canvas and investigated other avenues like installations, video and documentary. In this new work completed since 1989, there is constant exploration of the notions of power and truth. Together these form a psychological border that every Chinese person is painfully aware of, even with the apparent freedom in China at the dawn of the 21st century.
In dealing with this, Wang Jian Wei's work does not belong to conceptual Chinese art that flirts with the international art world. Through his extensive research and in-depth approach, an entirely new type of work appears that is difficult to understand outside of the cultural context. In the piece 'Ying Bi: Ping Feng (Screen: Screen)' he shows the various worlds that China is creating partly as a result of its drive towards modernization. In the south of the city of Chengdu, in the Sichuan Province of western China, hundreds of villas lie half-built on the road to the airport. These were left empty on land that was once meant for agriculture. Over a period of a year, Wang Jian Wei followed three farmers' families who had built their lives there. Because these inhabitants were living there illegally, it took a great deal of patience to win their trust for the video recording. He eventually recorded 60 hours of material that forms a moving document of these luxury ruins and the dispossessed farmers, both of them a half-product of Chinese development that's racing ahead. As well as in this installation, he also worked these images into his documentary 'Living Elsewhere'. About this work he says: "My interest in this is what kind of relationships they would develop with the space, what would relate to the past and what to the present. Ten years ago, you could immediately identify them; you would say they were peasants. But now, how much do they justify that kind of judgment? Their life their dirty hair and clothes, might support that idea, but they live in ''villas''. Their work doesn't have to do with the earth, and this undermines your former judgement. If peasants don't have land, can they still be called peasants? But they can't be called city-dwellers either.'' In one of the other projections, a shopping centre is opened with a great deal of show a fanfare, balloons and other embellishments. During these festivities, sweaty, bare-chested demolition workers on the roofs further up the street, carry on their destructive work digging great holes in the cityscape to give the Chinese cosmopolitan city the room to modernize. In the 'western' bustle on the newly built square at Beijing West Railway Station, Wang Jian Wei filmed a portrait of an empty plastic bag blowing playfully in the wind that no one notices anymore. With these types of work, Wang Jian Wei continually transcends not just political-cultural barriers, but also his own artistic limits. He used the principle of Ping Feng in his first theatre production that he completed this year. He got his inspiration from the painting 'Evening Party at Han Xizai'. A masterpiece of Chinese art by Gu Hongzhong, a portrait painter at the court of the Tang Dynasty (943-975). The political context is one of growing tension between north and south. Wang Jian Wei wrote the text himself. It begins with the fictitious story of the kidnapping of Gu Hongzhong and the theft of the painting, and is interspersed with a multitude of video images. For Wang Jian Wei, these crimes are to do with the radically different role of the contemporary artist compared to that of earlier artists. "Contemporary art raises all kinds of questions, while classical art is good art
You can appreciate it, you know what it brings you. One thing that contemporary art should not do is satisfy you. It should confront experience, confront people's system of understanding. If contemporary art doesn't challenge traditional experience, if it doesn't attack something, if it allows you to be comfortable, then as an artist you're the same as an entertainment star, a politician, a businessman, and there's no need for contemporary art."
Johan Pijnappel |
Wang Jian Wei, 1958, Sichuan (China)
Lives and works in Beijing (China)
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