Wang Gongxin & Lin Tianmiao

Acquired by the present owner directly from the artists

Shanghai Art Museum, Shanghai Biennale, 2002

He Hao ed., Here? or There? Wang Gongxin & Lin Tianmiao, Beijing, 2005, p. 117 -131, illustrated in color

“Most examples of husband-and-wife artistic collaboration place one partner (usually the wife) in a subservient role.  Here? Or There? is a rare instance of two strong artists with prominent individual careers melding their talents to produce something beyond their individual abilities, like two metals melted in proper proportion to create an alloy.” 

– Britta Erickson, Here? Or There? - Wang Gongxin and Lin Tianmiao, Hong Kong

Based in Beijing and celebrated internationally, Wang Gongxin (b.1960) and Lin Tianmiao (b.1961), are among the leading conceptual artists of their generation.  Living in New York from 1987-1995 and traveling internationally through the 1990s, they embarked upon a nomadic lifestyle, producing a diverse body of work that expresses their experience as global travelers.  Wang was an early and influential video and sound installation artist in China and the first to master digital editing.  And as one of China’s leading female artists, Lin has distinguished herself with experimental photography, domestic objects wrapped with thread, and elaborate installations deploying multiple media. Working independently and using very different approaches, the talented couple nevertheless shares similar interests in the juxtaposition of fantasy and reality, and there is a contemplative character to both bodies of work. 

The portfolio of photographs entitled Here? Or There? (Lot 270) represent the fruits of a rare collaboration by Wang Gongxin and Lin Tianmiao for the Shanghai Biennale in 2002, a multi-media installation in several parts, including photography, video, performance, eerie sculptures, and fashion.  The fifteen digitally-manipulated photographs included in the portfolio show bizarre, ghost-like women, draped in ethereal costumes and floating in and out of different landscapes.  Some spaces are rural and others urban; some are traditional and others modern.  The strangely dressed characters are equally varied:  some wear high-collared dresses made of Styrofoam balls; others sport dresses draped with tubular forms.  All of the costumes feature the same silvery-blue, gossamer appearance, which contrasts with the sepia-toned settings in which they perform their seemingly ritualistic movements.  From traditional Chinese courtyards to modern side streets, and from barren winter fields to small, rural demolition sites, these characters populate an otherwise empty world.

The “here or there” of the work’s title, a question of spatial relations and proximity, clearly also applies to the passage of time, to “now and then.”  For the sepia world the feminine beings occupy is one of the past as well as the present – or of the past’s lingering on in the present of their otherworldly experience.  These exotic characters somehow seem to embody as spirit the history of each of their dwelling places, ghosts testifying to the past in a language and appearance the present can hardly understand.  The photographs are strangely beautiful by any measure, and the whole of the production seems to have required extensive planning and preparation.  But as with the films of Matthew Barney, whatever components one might piece together never quite manage to add up to a complete story; no explicit narrative emerges from the photographs as a group, and their individual stories are no less mystifying.  Yet their very inscrutability draws the viewer in to this peculiar, distant world, provoking us to ponder the greater meaning of this fascinating, collaborative work.