Zhan Wang

The work is in generally very good condition overall and could benefit from a gentle cleaning. Otherwise there are no condition problems with this work.
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Zhan Wang's Artificial Rocks have found broad and enthusiastic international reception, appreciated by both sophisticated collectors of contemporary international art and by a general audience. The reasons for this include the works' dramatic abstract beauty, their intriguing combination of an industrial material—stainless steel—with a form taken from nature, and their captivatingly reflective surfaces, which change constantly in accordance with shifts in their surroundings. Although the finished sculptures seem to be an almost inevitable expression of the times, Zhan Wang's development of the concept behind the works did not happen over night. Rather, it followed a gradual process that parallels the development of contemporary Chinese sculpture.

Zhan Wang is the product of China's highly competitive, rigorous and—until recently—conservative art education system, and he has been a driving force encouraging students to think more creatively about the possibilities open to sculpture. It was only a century ago, when art students returned to China after studying in Europe, that sculpture was elevated to the status of a fine art. Prior to that it had been deemed a craft because of the manual labor it entailed. For the most part, overseas students were exposed to the academic realism au courant in French art schools at the turn of the twentieth century. That style morphed easily into the Socialist Realism imported from the Soviet Union half a century later with the rise of communism and was useful for creating statues of revolutionary heroes and martyrs.

Following his 1988 graduation from the Sculpture Department of the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing, where his training had focused on figurative sculpture, Zhan Wang was appointed to the Sculpture Research Institute affiliated with the Central Academy. His first major post-graduate work, In a Twinkling (1993), was composed of a group of super-realist figures falling, arising from a chair, or otherwise caught mid-gesture. With this Zhan Wang stepped out of the confines of classicism, adopted the mode of installation, and embarked on a career of experimental sculpture. Also significant, the focus of his work shifted to the state of society—precariously poised like the figures of In a Twinkling, or otherwise in flux, as characteristic of Beijing in the 1990's. In 1998, with the critic Yin Shuangxi, Zhan Wang coined the term "conceptual sculpture" (guannianxing diaosu) to define his work as belonging to a distinctively new category. At its core, "conceptual sculpture" entails the fusing of concept and material. For the field of Chinese sculpture, long dominated by representationalism, this was a profound and revolutionary insight into the nature of sculpture as an art form defined by its use of three-dimensional space rather than by a specific material or technique. Concept and material joined perfectly when Zhan Wang produced his first Artificial Rocks in 1995.

The genesis of the Artificial Rocks lies in the rapid and often aesthetically ill-considered process of urban redevelopment that has wracked Zhan Wang's native city of Beijing for well over a decade. Large swaths cutting through centuries-old neighborhoods were demolished to make way for characterless apartment blocks, shopping centers, and office complexes. Developers attempting to assert a Chinese sensibility used different ploys, including topping buildings with a Chinese "hat"—that is, an uptilted roof such as those gracing historic Chinese buildings—or siting an arrangement of large jiashanshi ("fake mountain rocks," variously referred to in the West as scholars' rocks, garden rocks or Taihu rocks) at the building's main entrance. These awkward measures served only to highlight the discrepancy between an architectural tradition that had developed over millennia as an integrated whole and the foreign format of the glass and steel high-rise hastily transplanted into a nation in the throes of helter-skelter growth. Zhan Wang experienced a kind of epiphany when he was fiddling with some bits of foil, twisting them into different shapes: if the ornamental rocks placed outside the new buildings were composed of shiny metal, like stainless steel, they would provide an effective visual link between past and present and would stand up visually to the buildings' modern materials. With that, he embarked on the Artificial Rocks series.

To produce an Artificial Rock, Zhan Wang first selects an original jiashanshi. Then small sheets of stainless steel are pounded onto the rock, until they conform exactly to the rock's surface. Finally, the numerous small pieces are welded together and the seams polished until they disappear, resulting in a stainless steel copy of the original. The extremely laborious process limits the number of pieces produced each year. Usually, it is possible to make just four copies from each original. In the case of the first work offered in the sale, the edition numbers only three.

The ornamental rocks on which Zhan Wang's Artificial Rocks are based have a long history in China, serving as a symbolic substitute for mountains when placed in gardens or, in the case of smaller rocks, atop a table. The concept behind the recently coined term 'biophilia'—the notion that humans have a strong affinity for nature and are comfortable when in touch with nature—has long been a tenet of Chinese philosophy. It was understood that time spent alone amidst nature was rejuvenating and a boon to creativity. For those tied to a job in the city, a suitable rock, or a garden including rocks and water, could be a viable substitute for the natural landscape and an object of restful contemplation. Zhan Wang's Artificial Rocks are philosophically more suited to a contemporary, often narcissistic, culture with a short attention span. While they reference nature as fully as the celebrated natural rocks upon which they are based, their shiny surfaces prohibit a meditative gaze:  instead, they reflect back an endlessly fascinating and highly distorted view of their surroundings, fluctuating with changes in light and in the viewer's perspective.

-Britta Erickson