This is a country that tests a man's mettle in a particular way. It is not only the physical distances in this vast continent that separate, even more unnerving can be the sense of aloneness in a populous city. All the major cities are situated on the edge of the land, abutting an ocean that spreads ceaselessly east, south and west and thus denying us any true relativity, particularly under often cloudless skies that are seemingly endless. A man can be very much on his own, more so possibly than elsewhere.
Wang Zhiyuan arrived in Australia in November 1989, five months after the debilitating events of Tiananmen Square, knowing nobody and with only himself to rely upon. What a remarkable test he had set himself. Yet perhaps he had truly freed himself from all else, other than his self expectation; he had established a tabula rasa. It inevitably took him a few years to find his feet, before the inner language of his vision aligned with an outer response to his new environment. Claire Roberts has pointed out: "The five panel canvas Happiness, created in 1996, marks a turning point in Wang's art. Overt references to Chineseness are discarded and flat cutout figures, stripped of their clothing, gender and history parade across the painting in curious groupings… After completing Happiness Wang was struck by the 'floating' figures and the incidental nature of the background and observed 'Why could I not put these figures on the walls directly, as if they are floating?'"[1 Wang Zhiyuan, From Painting to Wall Sculpture the Case of Wang Zhiyuan, Sydney College of the Arts 2000, MVA Dissertation, p5]1 He had hit upon the very means to express himself fully.
One of the great advantages of his art education in China was a broad training in a variety of techniques that fully equipped Wang as a printmaker, a painter and a man of resource. Brought up amidst communism where artists had to create work that served the ideology, and then under the dominance of the Cultural Revolution from 1966 to 1976, Wang studied at Beijing's Central Academy of Fine Arts from 1980 to 1984 during an era moving towards "an open door policy for reforms".[2 ibid p1]2
In Australia, gradually, Wang emerged from the chrysalis to confront the twin towers of modernism and postmodernism, and in Muhammed Ali's immortal words learned how to "float like a butterfly and sting like a bee". In 1994 he created a series of eight oil paintings Beauties captured in Time, and a similar number made up Sex and Play in 1995; these works combined aspects of Chinese erotic art, theories of appropriation, French Rococo painting, a resonant flatness of form, trans-gender creatures, and influence from the Italian trans-avantgarde particularly the artist Clemente, with the inspiration of Jeff Koons in the background. Wang has written how study of the latter's strategy helped him overcome both the strictures of his social realist education and the modernist demands for originality, as well as enabling the injection of ridicule, irony and humour into his oeuvre.
His great breakthrough emerged in 1997 with the work Two from One, which was effective on many levels. It consisted of ten separate elements that could be arranged in any setting, each a handmade MDF board cutout and painted in oil or acrylic. Each represented a hybrid, part human part animal or bird, part vegetation or element of nature, and they were placed five centimetres out from the wall, in a strange way resembling a series of floating bas-reliefs. In one hit, seemingly, Wang had allowed his own duality, being literally between the two worlds of his homeland and adopted habitat, with all the conflicts of these two entirely different circumstances, demands, cultures and requirements, to surface triumphantly and dexterously. He wrote: "I instinctively sensed that these works had accurately expressed both my thoughts and feelings… The basic concept came from the primitive attitude from ancient Taoism for interpreting the world. But I combined this concept with the art patterns of contemporary images. Taoism influenced my selection of images from either human or animal bodies or parts of plants which all had natural growth. They would continue to grow and would change from their present state".[3 ibid pp5, 8]3 The 'Complexity' theory of M. Mitchell Waldrop was another important influence,
Not only had Wang initiated the creation of an almost endless vocabulary for his art, but he had opened up the possibility both of using different materials other than plywood, sheet metal for example, and of involving others in its construction. He could now conceive and design the work and ensure the even quality of its production, whereas in his earlier paintings the quality was often uneven, he felt. Thus a second version of Two from One, consisting of thirty seven sheet metal elements, was manufactured in China in 1998, during a visit to Wang's family. In 1999 Ray Hughes' Gallery in Sydney exhibited his work, which was then shown at the National Gallery of Australia in 2000, with seven elements entering the collection. This artist had now most successfully made the transition from an artistic language that others owned to one that only he had created. He wrote, "it could be said that the 'fragmented wall sculpture' form with the characteristics of flexibility and flux fits my way of living a nomadic life".[4 ibid p11]4 After exhausting the five elements Taoism maintains make up the world, earth, fire, water, wood and gold, Wang appropriated many existing images from ancient icons to everyday consumables and wearables, creating a truly trans-historical and trans-national art.
At the very core of Wang's work is a belief in the interconnectedness of all life forces and of the individual being as a part of the whole, rather than the romantic notion of the artist in isolation in a garret. And his wall sculptures reflect these values; Fragments of 2000 had many elements, from a mosquito coil to a pair of barber's scissors and from flowers and plants to a pair of crossed female legs, each element independent yet in relationship to all the others, an open and changing rather than closed and set dialogue, maintaining a constant dynamic in which the viewer will always find an attraction. This major work, consisting of forty pieces, was purchased by the Queensland Art Gallery in 2002. Fragments of 2001 included an energy spiral, binoculars, a bottle opener and a light bulb, amongst various items, whilst Underpants of 2001 humorously displayed sixteen pink varieties in two lines one above the other, from sexy g-strings to old fashioned practical cover-ups. Untitled 2002 concentrated on the centres of various flowers, as well as plants in different arrangements, all of them in gold leaf.
At the very heart of the ancient philosophy of Taoism, which emerged in China more than two thousand years ago, is the following: "Tao does not create the myriad things consciously, since Tao is not God. Yet the myriad things originate from Tao. The creation of the myriad things is totally natural, the process of constant flux, there is nothing mystical about it".[5 Zhang Liwen, Zhang Xutong, Lin Dachueng, The Myriad Scene; Taoism and Chinese Culture, Beijing People's Publishing House, 1996, Chinese Version, p34]5 This understanding is at the core of Wang's artistic practice, and it enables him to create utterly remarkable and memorable works in which fragments of the world's culture and kitsch are presented non-hierarchically in a series of coherent family settings. He brings to each a different nuance, one appropriate only to that particular gathering, whether it be irony, pathos, humour or plain affection. And his new work proves that Wang will continue to be open to experiment and the influence of the world around him, and will take bravely whatever action is necessary, as he has demonstrated in the past, to remain unchained and independent; his is an art that speaks beyond all boundaries.
Nick Waterlow28 March 2003
1 Wang Zhiyuan, From Painting to Wall Sculpture the Case of Wang Zhiyuan, Sydney College of the Arts 2000, MVA Dissertation, p5
2 ibid p1 3 ibid pp5, 8 4 ibid p11 5 Zhang Liwen, Zhang Xutong, Lin Dachueng, The Myriad Scene; Taoism and Chinese Culture, Beijing People's Publishing House, 1996, Chinese Version, p34