A Grey Theatre
Pauline Doutreluingne
China is now suffering from the negative consequences of overuse of plastic bags. The country dumps over two billion plastic bags per day. You may find plastic bags in every corner of China, even in the remote rural places. The term "white pollution" was coined to describe the unsightly tumbleweed of plastic bags blowing around on streets. The people admit that this "white pollution" has resulted from a combination of factors, including China’s fast industrialisation, rising living standards of the Chinese people and drastic changes in consumption patterns.
At the second Guangzhou Triennial, Wang Jianwei’s installation consisted of eight ventilators and hundreds of white plastic bags, which blew around in the space. The Scene concerns the human craving for utopia. We want to make our life as easy as possible and continuously manufacture new technical appliances to realize this goal. We now have an artificial equivalent for every natural phenomenon. The things nature can offer us have until recently seemed insufficient. Especially in a country such as China, radically focused on economic development, it seems natural to add artificial objects as if it were a victory. Wang Jianwei uses the ventilator and the bag as symbols but of course, the work goes beyond these simple materials.
Wang Jianwei belongs to an old tradition of Chinese expression that does not see a distinction between art, society, responsibility and progressive thinking. He is definitely a conceptual artist and does not want to highlight aesthetic beauty in his work because then people only focus on the cosmetics of the work and don’t grasp the ideas he wants to express. For Wang Jianwei it is all about the ideas, topics and problems he sees in his surroundings and about putting them on a stage. That stage can be many different things, like a traditional theatre stage, the box of a video work, or a space where he puts his installation.
His artistic career, after being a soldier in the PLA for some years, began with oil painting. In China at the time, the beginning of the 80s, it was about the only contemporary artistic language practiced. Only later, when he started to study at the China Academy of Fine Arts in Hangzhou, he discovered by reading art books that something called installation art existed. Now he hasn’t used an easel to express his ideas for over ten years. It has a lot to do with the concept of freedom, Jianwei relates painting closely to the fact that in the past it was the only medium known and used for artistic creation. Now as a teacher, he instructs multimedia art to the students of the China Academy of Fine Arts because multimedia includes all the artistic languages, from new media to installation art and theatre to painting. Not that he dislikes the canvas. "Tomorrow or next year, I could paint again," says Jianwei, "I’m just experimenting."
Recently, Wang Jianwei’s solo exhibition "Relativism: a Flying Bird is Motionless"–a multimedia presentation incorporating video, photography and installations–resided in Chambers Fine Art in New York. He conceives each exhibition as a form of theatre where he can turn his conceptual brainstorms, his anthropological and social observations into a vision. The concept of theatre is important to him; he considers it a network of concepts, objects and characters, like a grey space, where both disorder and purity merge.
Each work of Wang Jianwei is the natural progress of a long period of thinking. He likes to take his time to finish a work, only stopping when he has reached the feeling he wanted to express. In his artistic creation, he is inspired by the society around him, as well as by the work of scientists, intellectuals, artists and authors from every corner of the world. He isn’t looking for perfection, but questions how art could demonstrate the grey area between the utopian ideal so stridently proclaimed in public and the private reality experienced in daily life and how his artworks could inspire individuals to think for themselves about prosaic issues they commonly overlooked.
