Art as Thought – my view of Wang Mai's art

Zou Yuejin

As I see it, to genuinely understand Wang Mai's art one must first understand his life in art, and the connections between that life in art and the dramatic changes in both Chinese society and the wider global order. This is because (and it is something we would do well to make particular note of) Wang Mai's art is in fact the outcome of a profound mental engagement with various major events in China and the world beyond. That depth of thought is both apparent in the political and cultural stands Wang takes, and evident in his artistic concepts and works.

Wang Mai began his contemporary art practice in the 1990s, his first works seeking to express the significance of mass media in popular culture – what television meant for contemporary Chinese society. We are familiar with the story of how the market reforms begun in 1992 turned Chinese popular culture and entertainment into a powerful force that undermined elite culture and Enlightenment thinking; during this same period Wang Mai created a series of primarily painted pieces that were a contemplation of and inquiry into how, between 'seeing' and 'being seen', the mass media exercised an invisible control on popular thinking, and the ideology manifest in this. Wang's take on this was still more strongly expressed in later works using new media and methods - his performance pieces May Day Choir and Spring Festival Gala; these were a further exposition of the inter-penetration and inter-linkage of popular entertainment culture ideology and everyday life. In his 2003 installation works Stele into Pagoda and Fortress of Fog, Wang displayed another new understanding of popular culture; by mixing the mass media version of popular culture with religious elements, Wang made reference to the extreme confusion at the boundary between the sacred and profane that is a feature of our times.

Coming into the present century, Wang Mai's art entered a period of entirely new developments; broadly speaking, these were constructed around the following different lines: first, how after the September 11 2001 attack on the World Trade Center Wang's artistic thought and creation shifted focus from China alone to the world in its entirety. This shift might be more accurately described as Wang beginning to consider and express the underlying significance and issues inherent in major events in China and elsewhere in the world from a globalised perspective. The connection between this turn and the September 11 incident might have been mere coincidence; whatever the case, it was a clear expression that the contemporaneity of Wang Mai's art was indeed founded on a profound concern for and deep contemplation of human society. In fact, subsequent major events, themselves consequences of the September 11 incident that first turned Wang's art to a global perspective, not only became an important resource for his continued deep inquiry into artistic method and contemporary social questions but also were an external force driving Wang's art to a greater maturity and his thinking to still more profound levels. Auditory Illusions at the Twin Towers, an installation piece created in 2001 just after the September 11 attack, was a direct response to the incident. The piece marked the beginning of a new period in Wang's art: art practice informed by a globalised perspective. This did not, of course, mean Wang was no longer concerned with social issues in China, including those questions of popular culture and the mass media; rather that a change had occurred in the perspective from which he viewed these questions, which was now to be in some way a global one. For example, in Wang's later artistic works his thinking about contemporary social issues and artistic creativity continued to rely primarily on various media reportage of major events, yet this by no means implied any fundamental change in his view of the mass media – he had not changed from doubter to believer, there had rather been a change in the perspective from which he was looking at things. Wang was no longer directly attacking the mass media as he had previously, suspicious of problems inherent to the media itself; he had instead shifted to treating incidents reported in the media as merely representations that could be used to reveal a reality concealed beneath, a reality that included even the often deceitful and agenda-serving representations themselves.

The 2003 Second Gulf War was an intensification of the US-led 'War on Terror' that began in the wake of  the September 11 attack in 2001. The war had an enormous impact on almost every aspect of global life and became the basis on which Wang Mai further contemplated and gave expression through his artistic creation to contemporary global political strategy, the human predicament and China's problems. The most important strand in this has been Wang Mai's thoughts on the status of oil as an energy source in today's world. Beginning in 2006, Wang created a series of both painted and installation works addressing this issue -- Capturing the Oil Monster with Strategy, Capturing the Oil Monster #7, 798 Petrol Station, East Petrol Station – and also a piece he showed at the Zhejiang Museum of Art, Journey to the West: The West Lake Climate Exchange.

The second line apparent in the development of Wang's art was his presentation of science and technology and religious themes. If we allow that Wang Mai's meditations on the September 11 attack are linked to the clash between religion and modernity, then the emergence of science themes in his art has its origins in China's 2003 launch of the Shenzhou 5 manned spacecraft. The importance of this event in terms of Wang Mai's art was how it evoked for him memories of being taught as a child in school and at the Children's Palace of Culture that science and technology were the path to reviving the nation, and how this was a time of unconditional worship of science. We must, however, observe that Wang Mai is unique in that he by no means engages in a abstract discussion of the value and significance of science and religions; rather he takes the launch of Shenzhou 5 as a starting point for a broader contemplation around a series of questions to do with the specific links between science and religion, politics, power, education and national strategy within the contemporary social context. This is why, aside from his 2005 major installation piece Future Buddha and 2009 installation A Home for Youth that are more concentrated expressions of his thoughts on science and religion, we find the figure of the astronaut-as-hero recurring in almost all his works made since 2005, evidence of the breadth of Wang's thinking and the exceptional quality of his artistic creativity.

The third line in Wang's work is his critique of capital and capitalism. Beginning some time around 2005, Wang produced a series of works featuring images of Marx and workers, for example the piece Missionary, and satirical works such as The Glories of Capital. I think that in today's contemporary art world Wang Mai is one of the most important artists attempting a fresh understanding of Marxism – including contemporary Western Marxian thought and its relation to China - from a genuinely global perspective, while remaining firmly rooted in China's realities. Of particular significance in this is his new evaluation of the status of the Chinese working class. Wang Mai's left stance is the product of his lived experience of the dramatic changes in Chinese society and the rapid widening of the gap between rich and poor, and is also linked to his understanding of the fundamental nature of capital and the problems attending the global expansion of capitalism.

We can see from the outline of Wang's artistic development that I set out above that his artistic thought and expression are inextricably linked to a number of major incidents that have occurred in China and beyond. Of course, more important still is the independent judgement Wang makes concerning the meanings contained within those incidents, the corresponding conceptual system he has gradually formed and his resolute and unambiguous positions and attitude. In my view, these positions and Wang's attitude are replete with the intellectual's concern for and belief in such universal human values as fairness, justice, individual liberty and rights, and full of criticism and mistrust of pillage, hegemony, overweening power and centralising regimes. In this regard Wang Mai is both a liberal and a modernist. At the same time, Wang worries about and is enraged by the greed that is the basic nature of capital and the inequality and rich-poor divide that capitalism creates; evidence that in this regard Wang is both a Marxist and a post-modernist.

We must however observe that despite Wang Mai having matters he pays particular attention to in the three main lines of his artistic creativity, as an artist working within a conceptual system, the three lines are mutually predicated and closely interlinked. I say this because in Wang Mai's art we find an exceptionally focussed exposition of what has been in one sense a change of direction in the way the global economy is becoming one single system due to the US-led 'War on Terror' that began at the turn of the new century; the pillage of the Third World by the developed nations has been concealed behind such mechanisms as futures exchanges (it is there that the price of oil is set each day) that seem part of equal and free market functioning but are in fact controlled by the major powers, who also arrogate to themselves the right to define terms in the global system of trade. At the same time, Third World nations, China included, are delighted to be allowed to take part in this global trade system controlled by Western capital. The exhibition of Journey to the West: The West Lake Climate Exchange at the Zhejiang Museum of Art is in fact an example of Wang's long-sustained critique, from a globalised perspective, of the unification of the global economy and of his deep contemplation of the dilemmas, conflicts and helplessness that China faces. Indeed, it is precisely by taking this globalised perspective that Wang has been able to consider afresh the impact on China past and present of science, religion, capital and capitalism.

Of course, since he is an artist rather than a political commentator, Wang Mai's artistic perspective is particular, rich and multi-dimensional, something that finds expression in his ability to construct visual imagery to a unique logic appropriate to his intellectual theme and so show the complexity of contemporary social issues. This ability of his is unquestionably rooted in the systematic, thorough and profound appreciation and understanding Wang applies to those things that he is concerned with, since only by so doing is he able to bring into play all the visual imagery related to the Chinese and non-Chinese history and present day reality, reorganise and reassemble it and so create works of art that are penetrating and have the power to affect the viewer. Some critics have said that the special character of Wang Mai's work is that it is a total and integrated art that crosses media and cultures. Yet from Wang Mai's point of view this character serves to enable the express still more apt and profound expression of his ideas and concepts. In this regard, it is my feeling that the unique character of Wang's work lies in how the logic of the visual imagery he constructs and the representational relationships between the subjects of his output are not direct but rather displaced, mutated, ambiguous, extra-ordinary and de-familiarised. It is this that gives the language of meaning in Wang's work its exceptional breadth and depth. If we adopt the  structuralist point of view to make a specific analysis of the method by which Wang constructs the logic of his imagery, we discover two basic structures. One is a temporal function; Wang excels at refashioning or rewriting historical visual imagery and texts such as pagodas, ritual objects, auspicious animal figures, Buddhas, bodhisattvas, classical poetry and calligraphy and then combining them with artefacts of the modern, so we have such things as a Space Bodhisattva or the Oil Monster. The former makes reference to the way that today religion and science have been combined in a curiously superstitious fashion, the latter by a metaphorical comparison of oil to a great beast gives more force to a presentation of the rapacious ferocity of the hegemonic control of energy resources. In cultural terms, Wang is mixing together images from different types and levels of culture, be they religious, magical, scientific, revolutionary, literati or popular, and by so doing he weaves a complex web of teeming ambiguity that in turn is a representation of a world replete with farce, paradox, conflict and confusion.

In conclusion, I want to reiterate that the power of Wang Mai's art comes from his thinking, and that thinking in turn comes from his ability to combine a Chinese standpoint with a globalised perspective and to mingle visual fields of history and present reality. So, this is art as thought; I am convinced that Wang Mai's art will come to occupy an increasingly important standing in Chinese contemporary art.

31 August 2010