Feng Mengbo

Hong Kong, Hanart TZ Gallery, Built to Order: New Works by Feng Mengbo, May 4-27, 2006, pp. 39-53, illustrated in color

A graduate of the Printmaking Department at the Central Academy of Fine Arts in his native Beijing (1991), Feng Mengbo (b. 1966) was the first computer-based multi-media artist to emerge from China.  Embraced early by the international curatorial community in notable exhibition such as the Venice Biennale (1993), the first and second Kwangju Biennales (1995 and 1997), and the Lyon and Johannesburg Biennales (both in 1997), Feng began to produce highly innovative interactive works based on video games in the mid-90s that were exhibited at Documenta X and XI (1997 and 2002) and that secured his reputation as a singular talent.  Since 1997 he has participated in numerous other biennale events as well as many of the most significant exhibitions of Chinese contemporary art around the world. 

Feng’s initial interest in the world of computer gaming derived from his experience as a player of the first-person online shooter game Quake III, released by iD Software in 1999; Feng soon began an interactive project based upon the game, Q4U, which was eventually installed at Documenta XI.  1999 was also the year that his son Rinao, the subject of Feng’s most recent film, was born, and, as the artist himself recently wrote, “My son had taken his first baby steps and uttered his first words amidst the gunfire and explosions of Quake III, and even before he could speak properly he had learned to ask me to play the game and let him watch.”^[1]  With the release of iD’s Return to Castle Wolfenstein, a game partially set in Adolf Hitler’s mountain citadel “Eagle’s Nest,” Rinao became addicted to interactive gaming.  But he also began to have violent nightmares and became increasingly prone to violent outbursts in kindergarten – “the bitter outcome of my carelessness,” as Feng reflects. 

This personal history provided the context for the development of The Next Eagle’s Nest (2005, Lot 68), a poignant, deeply humanist reflection upon childhood development and the history of 20^th century armed conflict.  The ten minute narrative begins with documentary footage of the military education of fascist youths in Germany, Italy and Japan.  Next, father and son’s visit the original Eagle’s Nest in Germany.  And for the remainder of the film, the image of Rinao playing with a more traditional LEGO toy is juxtaposed with a variety of documentary film images and voiceovers from the German propaganda film Triumph of the Will, the American war booster Why We Fight, and a variety of other historical media.  Rinao plays in slow motion, superimposed in the foreground, as increasingly fast-paced war imagery, which moves from black and white to color, screens in the background to the beat of a soundtrack created by the artist.  As Feng states, “The extreme slowness of Rinao‘s movements and the fast pace of the battle scenes make it impossible for the audience to focus, forcing them to choose between one scene and the other. This is more than a choice of visuals:  it is a choice of values.”

While The Next Eagle’s Nest is overtly political and anti-war, its formal strategies also target the mass media through which much of our experience of conflict is mediated:   television and film.  The entirety of the film features a logo-like bar across the bottom of the screen, which reminds one of nothing more than the brand and purpose-specific logos that now regularly accompany everything from Madison Square Garden sports coverage to the President’s State of the Union Address.  Indeed, the ubiquity of such media framing devices was the inspiration for this component of Feng’s collage.  Further, when Feng first showed the work at Hanart TZ in Hong Kong, he included computer-activated curtains that literally staged the work as a theatrical screening, thus replicating the mode of dissemination of the original source imagery and casting the viewer experience as a provocative engagement with war film as a genre of entertainment. 

Like most of Feng Mengbo’s work, The Next Eagle’s Nest is a sophisticated and thought-provoking interactive experience that questions not only our assumptions and expectations of art, but also our values and commitments in daily life.  These are the basis of the artist’s engaging practice, and as he states, “One can never ‘format’ history nor ‘reboot’ reality.”

^[1] Citations in this essay are taken from Feng Mengbo, “The Next Eagle’s Nest,” an essay translated by Valerie C. Doran and published by Hanart TZ, Hong Kong, in conjunction with the artist’s solo exhibition Built to Order, May 2006.