Zhan Wang

Executed in 2006, this work is number 1 from an edition of 4.

Acquired from the artist by the present owner in 2008

This work was in excellent condition overall. There are no apparent condition issues with the work.
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“Placed in a traditional courtyard, rock fragments used to satisfy people’s yearning for nature through their representation of rocks from nature. But huge changes in the world have made this traditional ideal increasingly outdated. I have thus used stainless steel to duplicate and transform natural rockery into manufactured forms. The material’s glittering surface, ostentatious glamour, and illusory appearance make it an ideal medium to convey new dreams.”
Zhan Wang

Zhen Wang is widely recognized as one of China's leading contemporary artists today, and his conceptual sculptures have been exhibited in numerous countries and collected by major public museums including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Born in Beijing in 1962, Zhan attended Beijing Industrial Arts College and the Central Academy of Fine Arts, where he currently works as a professor in the sculpture department. Having lived in Beijing all his life, Zhan has witnessed many of its transformations over the decades, and has observed the new rapidly eradicating the old in the city . Concerned with the relationship between these two opposing forces, in 1995 he started his Artificial Rocks art project in the joint exhibition of the Central Academy of Art’s sculpture department.

Seeking a dialogue between new technologies and cultural traditions, Zhan Wang draws his inspiration from the Chinese traditional culture of viewing and appreciating scholar’s rocks. In China, these rocks, which are called Jiashanshi, have long been admired as divine creation. Those rocks that are especially prized are the ones that have been sculpted naturally by the processes of erosion or that appear to have been shaped by nature, as well as those that resemble the shape and form of mountains. Pitted, perforated, and hollowed out rocks are seen as the epitome of the dynamic transformational processes of nature. In the eyes of the Chinese people, Jiashanshi symbolize not only the natural world but even the harmonious nature of the cosmos. However, unlike the Exquisite Jade Rock in Yu Garden, Shanghai, which is one of the few treasures that have been perfectly preserved in a Chinese garden setting for centuries, nowadays, Jiashanshi can now descend from the arena of the divine into the secular and industrialized society of modern day China. Thanks to Zhan Wang’s cultural and academic background, the artist is able to recreate Jiashanshi using stainless steel as a medium to transform and revive this aspect of traditional Chinese culture.

In Artificial Rock (literally Jiashanshi), completed in 2008, Zhan has casted an metallic copy of a rock which he has meticulously sourced. Sheets of stainless steel were hammered onto the rock in pieces to capture the complicated shape. They were then welded together into a solid and biomorphic whole. Hollow inside, the shiny and polished mirror finish of the work gives itself a mercurial look that reflects and takes on the colours of its surroundings. It’s thin body, it’s perforated and wrinkled surface seem to suggest traces of nature’s powerful forces, as if the original rock was sculpted by water, wind and ice erosion. Although the medium of Artificial Rock reveals a cold industrial dazzling light and brightness, the form itself is still natural and organic. The artist once said: “My use of stainless steel to replicate these natural jiashanshi appears to be a transformation of this concept. Actually, the transformation is only on the surface. Within it is still the natural jiashanshi form. Even though the stainless steel jiashanshi surface is ‘artificial,’ the interior is actually still a natural form, a concealed ‘truth,’ because true nature has already become void, and in the modernized city this artificial surface has acquired the status of visual reality anew, like the positioning of natural stones in traditional gardens.”

As Zhan’s most celebrated subject, Artificial Rock embodies the stillness, the divinity and the temptation just as a real ancient Jiashanshi. Its long and slim shape and involuted surface in a shiny modern material fits well into many aspects of the fast-paced lifestyle of contemporary industrial society, but still its concept is deeply rooted in traditional Chinese culture. Standing as a symbol both old and new, the natural and manufactured, Zhan Wang’s Artificial Rock opens up a dialogue between the man and his inner world:  a modern manifestation of the Chinese view of the cosmos.