| I was doing the “dollar” thing when more and more people came to know me. But I had done quite a few performances before that, for example Red Flag Canal, where I dyed a section of the railroad red. Such works bear strong cultural features of contemporary China. People ask me why I dyed the Red Flag Canal red instead of other colors. Some works are made for the audience while others are made for myself. I’m not saying that the works you make for yourself are not supposed to be shown to others, but what drives me to produce a work is my own need deep down. I cannot verbalize the feeling. Perhaps it’s a spontaneous wish. Red has become increasingly vague for me since the early 90s. |  |
Wang Jin
Wang Jin, I Love Tian An Men, Beijing, 2006-2007. Sculpture (stainless steel), 800 x 350 x 700 cm. Photo credit: Lao San. Courtesy of Pékin Fine Arts.
I was doing the “dollar” thing when more and more people came to know me. But I had done quite a few performances before that, for example Red Flag Canal, where I dyed a section of the railroad red. Such works bear strong cultural features of contemporary China. People ask me why I dyed the Red Flag Canal red instead of other colors. Some works are made for the audience while others are made for myself. I’m not saying that the works you make for yourself are not supposed to be shown to others, but what drives me to produce a work is my own need deep down. I cannot verbalize the feeling. Perhaps it’s a spontaneous wish. Red has become increasingly vague for me since the early 90s. With the development of time, my ideas now are quite different from those in the past. Now when I look back, it’s “the road we’ve traveled,” while at that time it was “the road we’re to travel.”
My performance, Ice, in Zhengzhou in late 1995, early 1996 was carried out with a commercial promotion in a public space, and a lot of audience got involved. My attitude toward the works done in the past is forgetting them. It is too tiring to look back on those things. That work seemed alien to the atmosphere of Chinese art scene then. It was just out of tune and seemed to have nothing to do with other art works at that time, though it looks more interesting today. Perhaps it is because of my habit—when people are doing similar things, I just don’t want to follow suit. I’m always looking for an approach of my own. There was controversy over who planned that performance in Zhengzhou. The work was planed by me, but I had two assistants. I wanted to involve many people, which was part of the work. I found two assistants in Zhengzhou, who helped me find icemakers and deal with the business people. I wrote a dialogue among us three, in the name of us three, though it was indeed written by me. It was also part of the work. You can never say that a work like that is done by one single person, just like the making of a film. Many were involved in that work, but after all, the plan was made by one man. And that man, undoubtedly, was me.
The performance following that was Marrying a Mule. Generally, I don’t want my image as an artist to appear in a work, but I do want me, as a person, to appear in it. In works such as Red Flag Canal, Ice, and Marrying a Mule, the image of myself was necessary in order to make the works convincible. But it was never done for self-promotion. I think the physical appearance of an artist in his work is the easiest way of doing art. But art is at its best when the artist’s image is submerged though s/he is the very maker of the work. That’s, I think, the greatest art.
