In Dilemma: Three Way Fork in the Road , Wang references Peking opera in a re-interpretation of traditional text. The performance begins with two broad-knife-wielding characters circling each other in conventional operatic steps. Oblivious to the presence of these two on stage, additional characters, in a mix of period costume and contemporary dress, enter the stage in increasing droves to consume a various of foods laid out on a table until they collapse and pile on top of each other. Invoking the traditional Chinese theatrical trope of a “three-way fork in the road,” the piece ruminates on the representation of the visible and the invisible and the simultaneity of past and present as critical reflection on the shortcomings of both antiquarianism and technocratic modernity.
Born in Sichuan Province, China in 1958, Wang Jianwei was trained as a painter at the Zhejiang Academy of Fine Arts (current China Academy of Fine Arts) in Hangzhou. Despite displaying technical virtuosity as a painter, Wang chose a working method that combines video, film and theater. Interested in combining the mundane, the historical, and the mythological, Wang’s works range from depicting the “plight of peasants occupying an abandoned housing project in Sichuan Province to films of post-1949 China during the height of Communist fervor and stories from the Tang Dynasty.” Particularly, poignant is the cognitive dissonance formed between presentations of the past and present in Wang’s work.
Golden Bridge is part of “Golden Journey”, a series of site-specific performances and installations created during Lin’s residency at Kadist San Francisco...
The Crime of Art is an animation by Kota Ezawa that appropriates scenes from various popular Hollywood films featuring the theft of artworks: a Monet painting in The Thomas Crown Affair (1999), a Rembrandt in Entrapment (1999), a Cellini in How to Steal a Million (1966), and an emerald encrusted dagger in Topkapi (1964)...
Peasant Sensation Passing Through Flesh – 3 consists of a massage chair fixed to a wall...
The lengthy titles in Chen Xiaoyun’s work often appear as colophons to his photographs that invite the viewer to a process of self realization through contemplating the distance between word and image...
Oliver Laric’s video Versions is part of an ongoing body of work that has continued to evolve and mutate over time...
The Tower of Babel is an installation of large-format photographs that forces the audience to occupy a central position through its monumental scale...
A mesmerizing experience of a vaguely familiar yet remote world, History of Chemistry I follows a group of men as they wander from somewhere beyond the edge of the sea through a vast landscape to an abandoned steel factory...
Every work in Hoeber’s 2011 series Execution Changes is titled in alphanumeric code...
State Terrorism in the ultimate form of Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood features a portrait of the artist wearing a zipped utilitarian jacket reminiscent of a worker’s uniform, with one arm behind his back as if forced to ingest a bundle of stick—a literal portrayal to the definition of fascism...