Wang Jianwei

signed in Pinyin and Chinese and numbered 4/5
executed in 2004

Chambers Fine Art, New York
Acquired by the present owner from the above

Australia, Sydney, Asia-Australia Arts Centre, Giant Steps, 2004
France, Lille, Euralille, Lille 2004, 2004
USA, New York, International Center of Photography, Between Past and Future: New Photography and Video from China, 11 June – 5 September, 2004
France, Nice, National Contemporary Art Centre, At East of the South of the West, 2004
USA, New York, MoMA, Film at the Gramercy Theatre, Mediascope, 9-23 February, 2004
USA, Miami, Art Basel Miami Beach Art Show,Beyond Icons: Chinese Contemporary Art in Miami, 2007, unpaginated (alternative version exhibited)
Denmark, Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Made in China: Works from the Estella Collection, 16 March - 5 August 2007, unpaginated  (alternative version exhibited)

The original DVD discs are generally in good condition.
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The Most Challenging Chinese Artist
Wang Jianwei

On October 31 of this year, Wang Jianwei’s solo show “Wang Jianwei: Time Temple” will open in the Guggenheim Museum in New York as the first of three exhibitions commissioned by the Robert H. N. Ho Family Foundation Chinese Art Initiative. This has turned Wang Jianwei into the most anticipated Chinese artist. He began a graduate program in the oil painting department of the Zhejiang Academy of Art in 1985 and engaged with this medium in the 1980’s. In the 90’s, he turned to video, performance, installation, and multimedia art. He is one of the most restlessly challenging Chinese artists working today and rejects the conventional perspectives on art and culture. His works have no fixed form, and each of them challenges the viewer’s predetermined, unexamined perspectives. He pointedly exploits the grey zone of in-betweenness and embraces ambiguity. From the mid-90’s onwards, he has participated frequently in important exhibitions abroad, including Documenta in 1997 (as the first Chinese participant in the event); the Sao Paolo Biennale in 2002; the Venice Biennale and international museums like New York’s Museum of Modern Art in 2003. In 2008, he was even awarded the Annual Artist Award by the American Foundation for Contemporary Art. In the present auction, we are pleased to have assembled a group of works by Wang Jianwei from different stages of his career, including the oil painting Eternity of the 1980’s; the video works Spider #1 and Spider #2 from the new millennium that explicate his notion of the “grey zone”; and the photograph Three-way Fork in the Road #3 from 2002.

Although Wang Jianwei’s style has changed considerably over the years, his art has remained rooted in his society. As the critic Karen Smith puts it, “In many ways, Wang Jianwei is more of a sociologist than an artist in his thinking. He sees visual art primarily as a powerful conduit for social analysis.”¹ Wang has always been interested in the potential for individual voices in society, and the significance this potential has for contemporary Chinese art:“I am interested in … [h]ow can these voices navigate the framework of modern life that has evolved here since 1979, and remain relevant where life changes on a daily basis.”² Wang Jiangwei’s art is always rooted in the Chinese people and the question of how they are shaped by the society and the times in which they live.

In fact, the grand backdrop of history left an indelible mark on the artist’s life and work very early on. In 1992, Wang Jianwei wrote in an autobiographical account, “Many years later, in all concepts which are both familiar and not so familiar to me, with so much fear and hesitation, I am tryingto establish some judgments with honesty—those judgments that are solid: actually they were wrestling hard just to establish themselves on the edge of my mind. An inchoate, inarticulate poverty constituted an elemental part of my being. They each become part of my life, without my knowing their existence. With the vigorous struggle that concludes" people have no basic concepts in their life", I feel the alienation of concepts, in behaviour as well as one's mind. All in all, these all in their way contribute their effects on my attitude towards life. Together with the hesitation,　challenge and choice that I have come across so far, ultimately I have had to find my　own way in deciding what path I should follow in arts.”³ In the 1980’s, before Wang became internationally renowned for his videos and performances, he was already an accomplished painter. Eternity (lot 829) is one of his outstanding canvas paintings.

Born in 1958 to a military family, Wang Jianwei enlisted in the People’s Liberation Army in 1976 and became a security and information officer at the Chengdu Painting Academy in Sichuan in 1983. In the following year, an exception was made for him to participate in the 6th National Art Exhibition, where he was awarded a gold medal for a work that was then collected by the National Museum of Art of China. For Wang Jianwei, who had not had any formal training at an art academy, this was an affirmation of his foundation in realist painting and his artistic talents. More importantly, however, the academy originally did not allow any artist to participate, and Wang was only allowed because he was not considered an artist. His award made the card-carrying artists reflect on what the label “artist” meant and challenged the conventional understandings of the term, setting him on a path antithetical to academism. He entered a graduate program at the Zhejiang Art Academy in 1985 and the Beijing Painting Academy in 1987. Until the early 90’s, his primary medium was oil painting. His works are strongly philosophically and based in a realist style, but his expression is influenced by Western art and reflects his earlier meditations on the nature of artistic creation.

Created in 1990, Eternity is part of the Teahouse series, Wang Jianwei’s most famous series to date, and was exhibited in 1991 at the Hong Kong Art Center. The Teahouse series originated from the Sichuan teahouses that the artist knows very well. Like cafés in France or bars in the United Kingdom, teahouses are microcosms of society. Its visitors symbolize about Chinese life under economic reform. In Eternity, Wang Jianwei creates an unreal space in which people from different times coexist; a colorful female nude sits next to the tea-drinker, and there is a historical personage in red on the right, suggesting the acceleration of time in modern China. Eternity employs the official academic style of realism, but mixes into it surrealism and abstract figuration. The overlapping images on the tea-drinker and the rendition of figures from multiple angles recall the work of the Irish painter Francis Bacon.

As he does also for his later works, Wang Jianwei rejects any explicit interpretation of Teahouse. In his autobiographical account, he describes his creative process in symbolic terms: “Here is a vast, perspiring tranquility. The ambiguous colors and the straightforward denials and the moments of striking clarity deepen the foreboding and vagueness of the overall work. The processes of painstaking meditations and the irrepressible murmurs are collected into an incomplete and unclear mental state. In a threatened, humid space, a “heroic figure” stands, panting and paralyzed by stress.” ⁴ The man in Eternity may well be the “heroic figure” of this new age, dazed by the interweaving of past and present.

For Wang Jianwei, artistic creation is a way to understand the world, but he rejects certain artistic tendencies and prevents them from arising in his work. In the mid-1990’s, he sensed the limitations of canvas painting and decided to give up oil painting completely, turning instead to video, performance, and installation. After his first video piece Production of 1996, he created Spider No.1 (lot 831) and Spider No.2 (lot 830) in 2004 and 2005 respectively. The former was exhibited in Wang’s solo show at the Australian Centre of Asia Pacific Art and in the video section of the exhibition “China Now” at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. These two video works, originating in and incorporating Wang’s dramatic performance, explores new significances of space: “[I] attempted to find ways to produce and read overlapping spaces through the means of the ‘dramatic stage.’”⁵ Spider #1 features four performs adopting the respective attitudes of history, society, culture, and fable. Through their performances, they meet and overlap in four functional areas of a company: a conference room, an office space, a manager’s office, and a hallway. In Spider #2, members of a family hover between a dream and quotidian reality in a household setting. At the same time, the space contains several “invisible members”—are these figments of the family members’ imagination, their body doubles, or their memories? Sharing space and time, they see but fail to recognize each other. As Wang Jianwei himself writes, “Spider makes significance in relationships turn grey.” ⁶ Fully embodying Wang’s longstanding aesthetic pursuit of the “grey zone,” Spider is a highly representative series. The present offer of both #1 and #2 is a golden opportunity for collectors.

Action (Lot 832) is a rare photographic work by Wang Jianwei. It thematizes interpersonal interaction and documents Wang’s explorations of relationships and order. Three computer screens are arranged in the form of a classic triptych. The central screen shows the interactions of 20 pairs of people, while the left and the right screens show respectively a green and a red person. Like yin and yang, they both manifest and evacuate the complexities of the relationships shown. Are they lonely? Are they struggling? The piece also includes audio recordings of the people involved.

Wang Jianwei has always been averse to interpreting his own works excessively and hopes that viewers will bring even more meanings to them. One of the few Chinese artists with a truly international voice and stature, he has ceaselessly expanded the possibilities of contemporary art. As his works are exhibited around the world with increasing frequency, his influence will no doubt become even stronger.

1 Karen Smith, Nine Lives: The Birth of Avant-Garde Art in New China, p. 425.
2 Refer to 1
3 Wang Jianwei, “Me and My Work”, An Exhibition of Oil Paintings by Wang Jianwei.
4 Refer to 3
5 Artist’s self-account of Spider #1 and Spider #2.
6 Refer to 5