Wang Zhiyuan moved to Australia in 1989 and remained there for a decade. In the time he was abroad, Chinese contemporary art underwent rapid development. A decade after his return, for some people Wang Zhiyuan is not a "hot" artist in terms of media attention or the marketplace.
Art critics often talk about "young talents" or "successful mature talents". Wang Zhiyuan is certainly no longer young, and we don't know yet whether he will be judged a successful mature talent. As his friend of another generation, however, I know that he has been at the intersection of art and the Zeitgeist for more than two decades. Such a period is generally seen as half of an artist's career, but it is still not long enough to truly measure success. We are not in a position to foresee what history's conclusion will be. The Italian philosopher Benedetto Croce said that all history is contemporary history. The media, caught up in the moment, often make judgments that seem authoritative but are actually shallow. Critics, on the other hand, tend to word their assessments more cautiously. The difference between the mass media and criticism is that the former seizes on a symbol and amplifies it to full volume, while the latter takes context and history into account and does not rush to judgment. Unfortunately we live in a time of media rather than criticism. Thus the mass media treat many artists like consumer goods, while other artists are ignored.
So in preparing this article, I did a good deal of research and reflection about Wang Zhiyuan's art. I firmly believe that any artist should embrace social realities and create in response to them works appropriate to the truth of the time, depending on their life experience, background and understanding of history. It is either naïve or mendacious to insist that art should depict only direct and unadulterated reality.
Fragmented wall sculptures
Wang Zhiyuan has for long used a form that is a hybrid between picture and sculpture, and which he calls "fragmented wall sculpture". The origins of this may lie in his early training in graphic arts and print media. From early works like Two from One to Fragments, Magic Box, Fire and his Underpants series, he has continuously employed this format, though changing the scale. A "fragmented wall sculpture" is actually a relief, but not in its traditional definition. These works by Wang Zhiyuan are not displayed en bloc on a wall; instead, their component parts can be grouped in various ways so that they seem to float just in front of the wall.
Two from One (1997) seems to be influenced by Australian indigenous contemporary art. It comprises many unique and mysterious non-realistic images. With the creation of Fragments (2000), Wang Zhiyuan has made this form a vehicle for the expression of ideas about contemporary life and society. Fragments (2000) seems a realistic reflection on the realities of an age when metaphysics is dead and society is awash in pop and commercial culture.
Everyday Fragments
Fragments was created just before the artist returned to China to live. Chinese critics are today very familiar with Wang Zhiyuan's Underpants, and rarely talk about Fragments. In fact, the latter marked an important transition for the artist. In it, he no longer included images drawn from literature or folk culture. Instead he depicted ordinary ready-made objects. He also suppressed his own ego. He invited the people installing the work to arrange the forty pieces of Fragments on the walls as they pleased. Thus the everyday objects in Fragments became fragments of a language. Different exhibition staff arranged the pieces according to their own taste, and viewers of different cultural backgrounds also interpreted them differently.
For the artist, the idea was to make something empty and return to zero. He once said: "First, I negate creation itself. At the start of the 21st century, I doubt whether such a thing as 'original creation' should still exist in visual art. Second, I negate any fixed meaning embedded in any work. I believe the meaning of any work should vary over time and be interpreted differently by different viewers. For that reason, all the forty images in Fragments are copies from books, catalogues, decorative objects …" Fragments evokes a sense of floating that reflects the experiences of Wang Zhiyuan as a migrant in Australia. But it also casts doubt upon the idea of "original creation" and exalts the objects of everyday life.
Underpants and materialistic desire
One of the images in Fragments was a pair of underpants. They were presented at the same size as all the other everyday objects, with no special meaning or emphasis. The sense of floating may also reflect a sense of disconnection from art history and one's own identity. It is possible that Wang Zhiyuan's move back to China in 2001 was motivated by the desire to rescue himself from that sense of floating. If so, it was a mistaken desire. For China has lost its spiritual roots, and its lust for material wealth is so extreme as to make Australia seem like a pastoral Shangri-La by comparison. What Wang Zhiyuan has experienced here is only the "madness of desire for materialism". In his newer works, underpants—items of clothing that are usually concealed—are hugely enlarged, conveying today's hyperinflation of desire as well as the enlarged role of sexuality and everything connected with it. In Wang Zhiyuan's work, lowly items of underwear are formally displayed as art and thus become items we are expected to view and even venerate. The items from daily life that made up Fragments and Wang Zhiyuan's doubts about art have fused with a mood of mischievous absurdity and carnival. Hidden beneath the surface are doubt, spiritual loss and perhaps the artist's disappointment in the homecoming he'd looked forward to. The recurrent image of underpants makes Wang Zhiyuan's work resemble Kinetic Art in form, but in spirit it could hardly be more different.
Electronic garbage as art
Performances and carnivals all come to an end. Since the beginning of 2009, Wang Zhiyuan has been incorporating video images and discarded electronic components into his work. These obsolete parts are connected with glittering lights of the kind you see at night in hair salons in the suburbs. They are intended to convey prosperity, but the reality is poverty and spiritual loss. Electronic waste very often reminds people of the economic crisis or the imbalance between rich and poor nations. In Wang Zhiyuan's work, it and the flashing images seem to be the excreta of a civilisation gone mad. If the everyday objects in Fragments had an aura of modernist poetry, this electronic bric-a-brac is cold and grubby. Most recently, Wang Zhiyuan has been converting these bits and pieces into sculptures and setting classical poetry and landscape paintings on their surface. Whereas Underpants tried to redirect viewers from the grand to the vulgar, these works convey a sense of emptiness. What we see here is the outcome of art bubbles: rubbish created in the name of art.
Whether we see artists in the light of history or of the Zeitgeist, we tend to overgeneralise about them, but that should not stop us from making interpretations. In Wang Zhiyuan's art, we see confrontations between everyday life, art history and the spiritual state of the individual. But the anger of the Underpants series has been transformed into the calm of landscape painting. The classical verse on Untitled (2009) reads: "The past, like dust, is gone with the ebb tide. You live out your remaining days with endless memories." That verse matches the viewer's sense of loss after seeing this exploration of reality and art history. But such reactions might be what lead us to continue making art and writing art history.
Translated by Jin Hua