Wang Gongxin
I was most impressed by Wang Gongxin’s video art in The Rise of East Asia Video Art exhibition. Wang Gongxin is a pioneer of avant-garde video and media art in China. His artworks concern with political and social issues, as well as history and tradition. He is credited as one of the first artists to have created a site-specific video installation in China in the mid-1990s. He is one of the most celebrated Chinese contemporary artists of his generation, alongside contemporaries such as Ai Weiwei and Cai Guo-Qiang. As a first-generation Chinese video artist, Wang Gongxin has been credited as one of the catalyzing forces in the Chinese video art movement, which has since produced artists such as award-winning filmmaker and photographer Yang Fudong, photographer and video artist Wang Qingsong, and video artist Cao Fei.
With the use of CCTV cameras and live projections, Two Square Meter Space calls for the reconciliation of real-life with virtual realities. The two square meters become an uncertain proposition, which can be interpreted as concrete measurement, an exterior recorded appearance, and an interior video projection. The fact that the viewer is both the participant outside the wall and the voyeur watching the projection, together with the delay when switching identities, brings a new spatial surveillance experience.
The Broken Bench combines traditional Chinese handcrafted furniture with culturally non-specific video technology. The monitor acts as joinery or repairment for the cutout, resurrecting the bench in two mediums and two experiences of times. The video recording of the absent wooden cutout in a way brings liveness to the bench in its present form.
The Sky of Brooklyn – digging a hole in Beijing is a site-specific video art installation. Wang Gongxin dug a hole 3.5 meters deep in the middle of his living room in Beijing. At the bottom, he placed a television monitor playing footage of the sky, filmed from his studio in Williamsburg before he flew back. Viewers need to look down at the hole in Beijing to look up at the sky in Brooklyn while hearing the artist’s voice shouting in Mandarine “What are you looking at?,” then quietly murmuring, “It’s nothing. Just the sky.” Digging a hole to China is an American expression of describing an impossible task, like burrowing into the earth far enough to come out the other side of the planet. However, the situation was reversed when Wu Gongxin dug a hole from Beijing back to New York. The work represents both connections and distances, physically and culturally, between the US and China that Wang experienced in the 1990s. The work also satirizes the absurdity of differentiating clouds by national boundaries, while raising the awareness of globalization through media technologies and contemporary art.
Wang Goingxin’s video artworks end up feeling more like video installation, or in his own words “sculpture installations.” He embraces this video medium as a graphic technology while adding performative and sculptural quality to his work beyond the boundary of video art. He decenters videos alone as the center of meaning, but in combination with other objects, performances, and the environments to form true expressions.
Reference:
http://www.maap.org.au/wang-gongxin2/
https://collections.mplus.org.hk/en/objects/the-sky-of-brooklyndigging-a-hole-in-beijing-201654
http://www.leapleapleap.com/2010/08/wang-gongxin-relating/
https://theartling.com/en/artists/wang-gongxin/