Wang Mai: TODAY CLIMATE EXCHANGE CENTRE

Karen Smith

Wang Mai: ‘Science is the monster of our age. Today, it is a new religion.’

Wang Mai is an unusual artist in the contemporary Chinese art scene for the style of his art as much as for the skills he brings to realizing it. His art has a light, young feel, even where the topics he explores, particularly in recent years, points to the dark, bleak problems of the modern world, and draws upon a very particular local love of certain styles of folk tradition and crafts.
Wang Mai’s works are primarily sculptural—although he is also known for his paintings—and, when combined together for his large-scale installations, have a strong seam of fantasy about them. However, as suggested, the themes Wang Mai explores are particularly topical and act as a counterweight to the lightness that the sculptures suggest. One might compare the work to a cartoon that explores serious themes. Having said that the work is sculptural it might be more properly described as a form of assemblage. Wang Mai has spent much time and energy collecting, preserving and recycling a mountain of materials that were, initially, to be abandoned from Beijing’s 798 Art Zone as more and more of the buildings and former machine rooms and assembly lines were torn out to make way for the increasing number of artists and galleries (and latterly shopping outlets) that sought to move in. Given that these factory operations had been little changed since the complex was first built in the late 1950s, many of the machine part and factory lines were original. This provided Wang Mai with a rich resource of precious, hand-crafted wooden moulds and other assorted machine parts and a store of inspiration and possibilities. Thus, in recent years, Wang Mai has carefully chosen from these assorted elements abandoned by modernization, individual pieces that have been seamlessly reconstituted together to form all manner of objects and figures into androids and creatures of his own imagining, which NAMOC director Fan Di’an describes as ‘strange monsters created using magic ways’.
The fruits of this labour were presented last year in a major solo exhibition at the newly opened Hangzhou Museum of Art. En mass, Wang Mai’s works looked like a grown-up playground, but the exhibition’s title provides a clue to the nature of his concerns: A Journey to the West; The West Lake Climate Change focused entirely on environmental issues related to energy and Man’s exploitation of natural resources. Thus he created petrol stations, oil pipes, gas attendants and crisis management workers faced with reversing leaks and environmental damage. The figures have a childlike quality. Indeed, Wang Mai’s inspiration owes much to comic books read as a child in a very different era of China’s social development, and to folk traditions of carving, craft and figuration that are only now becoming fashionable again. Thus, using these youthful forms and popular cultural icons, motifs and forms Wang Mai is able to present important issues in the guise of humorous jibes, to raise critical comments on the false promises of “democratic” capitalism, which ultimately serves only those rich enough to engage with it.
It is on that note that for HIVE Wang Mai chose to present TODAY CLIMATE EXCHANGE CENTRE. For the audience pleasure, TODAY CLIMATE EXCHANGE CENTRE offers not a science lab or display of research materials one might expect but a private Pachinko parlor of the type common in Asia. Each of the machines has been deconstructed, rewired, and reconstructed to Wang Mai’s specifications, and will as a result eat all the money you can throw at them. Just don’t expect a payout. As if warning of the dangers of this most common form of gambling, the room itself is in disarray. All it takes is one coin too many for the gambler’s world to come tumbling down around them. This exchange mechanism runs one way only.