Travelling through the Wang Zhiyuan world you may realize that you are in a strange land where it becomes necessary to understand why the artist tries to build up a kind of imaginary in which it is possible to adapt any object into an artwork. In spite of my knowledge of his art work I sense that I could drift towards a wrong comprehension of a career that is the result of a long experimental process, in which life and different circumstances are together part of the same venture. I feel as a foreigner in the artist desert, on the one hand because I do not share his cultural background at large and I should be wise enough to try and be as much careful as possible when facing his works; and, on the other, because I would not like to make a mistake when approaching him and his career. My own experience with his work goes back to the first visit I made to his studio in 2008. It was Jin Hua who introduced Wang Zhiyuan to me. He drove me to his studio somewhere in the Beijing suburbs without telling me too much about who we were going to meet. But I still recall the impact I experienced when I saw “Object of Desire” (2008) and “Purge” (2009), and the series of women panties in ceramics following the most kitsch trend ever seen. I thought that the artist tried to accomplish without any kind of prior prejudice what he believed to be a kind of “truth-telling”, as quoted by Michel Foucault concerning Magritte paintings and his receptivity to existential dialectics in order to release the world from the need to be perceived as a unique or complete truth. Consequently, denying evidence of the object represented through painting by saying it is indeed a fake, as the artist wrote on the canvas, in spite of its more than likely identification with the real world, was a way of opening the world to a relational system of perception. In that case, the only reliable system of communication appeared then to be the language used to deny the object´s authenticity, as if that what we commonly see is far from the truth and could only be performed as what Baudrillard understood as sing-value in The System of Objects (1968) followed by The Consumer Society (1970). His aim was to explore everyday life through the objects and the signs that surround modern societies through the development of new technologies and ubiquitous mass production, in order to comprehend how the technological progress affects social change through the effacement of reality by constantly simulating it.
Refusing social conventions within the framework of the art world and common art practices, Wang Zhiyuan seems to position himself in the end of art, when realizing that its capacities of reproduction replace production and the image of things replace things themselves in an overexposed fragmented world dominated by images. To that he reacts confronting himself to an isolated realm, where you feel lost and try to protect yourself from new social pathologies created by the replacement of things by its rehearsal or simulacrum as well as by the proliferation of commodities in our Media society. That is why the artist is driven to change or simply pervert the meaning of things, in order to discover what seems to be hidden or not explicit when we look at them only as images of themselves. Or as if they belonged to the regime of the screen shaped as a mirror, which absorbs what we believed to be the real world. The artist´s device could be compared to the one of a narrator looking at the world and wanting to tell stories of his own, while showing his skills to transfer his critical views upon society into his work. Any statement against the value of language and its potential can be waived, when used for connecting the self and the world within a dysfunctional multiplicity of signs that can be delivered within time and space through all kinds of resemblance. To be aware of the influence of the given display of commodities for consumers into the art world, and how it has transformed the artistic and aesthetic values, is an essential condition at this stage and no artist can underestimate its consequences.
Adoption, conversion and transmission are attitudes that become key components when thinking about Wang Zhiyuan art world, where the artist organizes a system of meaning and produces modes of signification that deserve a slower approach, in order to corroborate his purpose which is not as easy to discern as it may seem to be at first glance. After visiting his studio I decided to introduce two of his main works in the exhibition project “Beijing Time”(2010) I was co-curating then with Fang Zhenning. I selected “Object of Desire” and “Purge”, already mentioned here, because I thought both were very prominent and significant works. Nobody can escape to their strong visual presence even after all these years since they were conceived. The former one is a huge installation made of a big woman panties on whose surface the artist recreates a night bar scene where a woman says to a rich man, his client, “Diamonds matter first”, leaving it clear what she is expecting to get from her services. While you watch the installation, you can hear a popular song from the 30s in Shanghai –“When are you coming again”. The artist becomes a narrator who does not need to say anything else to get the results he expects from the audiences. Everything is said through this three dimensional painting hanging on the wall. You can write a story after what you see and complete the proposal the artist tries to make implementing its meaning. The panties become a metaphor of sexuality and religion through anthropology – his series of sculptures whose model are little pants bought in street markets but converted into small art works simply by copying them and making a kind of small iconic figures behave as authentic sculptures. He does not give up drawing or painting, but he rather enjoys it in a baroque manner when adding in bas-relief style above the surface of his panties landscapes with mountains, trees or flowers, as well as any kitsch decoration which can be found on any of the models. The paradox is served when one tries to analyze their new meaning due to the conversion made by the artist using them as tools to say something different from that what they usually mean as global consumer goods to all people everywhere in the world. Panties never were in the art history considered as common objects to be copied or to be a model for painting or sculpture, in spite of the radical art practices that changed the art world from the sixties until nowadays.
The same unexpected impression seems to happen with “Purge”, a still more inconvenient figure based on men underpants – a huge construction against the wall, almost 5 meters tall, made of fiber glass, electronic rubbish sound and led, which could be understood as a sad allegory of our present times seen from a non-too far future performing a dystopia in which our society must accept its apocalypse. The men underpants is an enormous construction, open in the front and through which comes a cascade of technological rubbish which is being emptied from what is behind it –the human body and the self. A pile of cables, computers and different screens is made after dropping them at random –nevertheless the artist himself takes a special care to control the fall of these materials out of function, although he manages to have some screens working to better show the decline and disillusion of a society which eventually could not survive without screens and that would be paralyzed if one day we had no more electricity. The word “purge” suggests the action of cleaning in depth and of eliminating toxic substances or residues, which live in our organisms and can damage them. It is also used as a metaphor when applied in politics by a government whose power is being emphasized by imposing a purge as a way of getting rid of its enemies or of showing its totalitarian power. But, as it is employed by the artist, it applies to the overwhelming flux of images that the consumer downloads every day while achieving his transmission ordered by non visible powers, and hence he can´t control them.
Ready-made panties and men underpants literally recall in Wang Zhiyuan’s work Duchamp´s urinary although the artist seems not to mention that in any case. He allows the “reader” to make his own connections when trying to articulate his works among themselves and with the art history in order to understand them. “Fountain” the title of Duchamp´s most famous work is a kind of joke that allowed the artist to identify a urinary as a “fountain” and make it to really look as a fountain. “Object of Desire” and “Purge” play with the images which are dropped from readymade goods as panties and underpants of common use and Duchamp´s urinary do. The comparison between the sanitary ware, associated with bodily waste, and panties and underpants exposed like icons of our social decay is not irrelevant, but rather the opposite. Both, panties or underpants, and the urinary are popular fetishes that are activated as such, in order to make them become symbols of the world in which we live. In spite of cultural differences and historical distance between both artists, the ready-made is on the basis of their art works and they behave as such in a field of extended senses as the one in which they move.
The artist is not an artist, but he is an artist; this old paradox seems to come from different semantic sources based on a philosophical proposition in which that what is denied becomes asserted and where the truth is only known through its negation. The artist conceals himself and his work under forms that not only refuse to be conventional art forms, but are not usual art forms. The game consists of being what seems to be denied by the artist himself as well as he adapts the existing world into the furniture of his own art world. Reality and symbol are at the beginning of a construct in which the artist transforms the value of things into an artistic and aesthetic category. He himself looks like a foreigner in a world of mass consumption, where goods are the only existing world and he tries to reverse their meaning to make them say something which was unknown till then. He works with, as if they were tools to organize into a language of its own, where analogies among things allow him to perform an entirely new world where he lives and works. Relocating already existing things is part of the artist´s activity as well as a way of assembling them while contesting what we call the truth, when we identify it only with what we see. Furthermore it reminds us that the truth is invisible, in spite of its reversible connections with what seems to be the real world, as it is what remains behind the image itself and that what is represented by it.
His attempt to explore a system of representation based on appropriation and dystopia makes him aware of what he is in charge of, if he assumes what he believes an artist must be without being an artist, and the treachery of images when trying to represent reality. Wang Zhiyuan employs familiar objects and goods and subverts them in order to change the relations we have established with them. This practice allows him to discover that what we usually ignore of the things we see and makes us sense their autonomy. Hence the artist is bound to create a composition in which the visual elements must say something that alters our way of looking at things. This is what he manages to do in works like the ones quoted here and also in “The Cross behind the Underpants” (2008), a multi-media installation too, where a pneumatic machine opens the big structure leaving a whole in the shape of a cross while a video is projected on it, at the same time that the light switches on and off. Controlled by a computer, the scene lasts five minutes and comes back to existence every another three minutes. The subject is somehow common to “Object of Desire” and “Purge”, although the cross makes more explicit certain issues related to systems of thought and beliefs, taking into account the different modes of looking at them and behave accordingly.
Coming back to the statement This is not an artist | The treachery of images I would like to add that negation is part of a dialectical process through which assertion comes from a previous denial of that what seems to be and can be at the same time. This is why it might be said he is not an artist, because he is precisely that and why images can mean a betrayal in relation to what they really mean, because they can be something else and different from what they apparently are. The semantic game between the word and what it represents shows the disruption of meanings that the artist undertakes as a writer without being a writer or as an artist who is not an artist, because he is more than an artist. “In the sea of darkness”, as he says while explaining what the artist wants to communicate in the installation “Close to Warmth”, he enters in the language domain and comparative linguistics to show how tricky the words can be depending on the codes used to organize them as signifiers of an existing or non-existing reality, through the statements that are built up as such, in spite of resisting any definition.