The National Art Museum of China (NAMOC) is proud to present “Garden Utopia”, Zhan Wang’s largest solo exhibition to date. Showcasing over fifty works, including his renowned stainless steel sculptures, this exhibition will also include video works, photography, installation and media works by this internationally acclaimed Chinese artist.

Over the past decade, Zhan Wang’s predominant sculptural practice has taken place in tandem with an exploration of installation, performance, and video. By examining the relationship between material, technique and theory, Zhan Wang has developed a language of “conceptual sculpture” seeking to overturn the traditional understanding of sculpture in China to explore the meaning of three-dimensional space in relationship to the phenomenon of installation art, an idea evidenced in his stainless steel “Artificial Rock” series. At the same time, Zhan Wang has used his sculptures to engage a broader social consciousness through “public” works, such as “Inlay the Great Wall”, “12 Nautical Miles”, “Mt. Everest”, and “New Plan to Fill the Sky”, expanding upon the idea of how art can engage with public space and the general community.

Specifically designed for the unique architecture of the NAMOC, ”Garden Utopia” will transform its halls into a “traditional” Chinese garden. The stainless steel “Artificial Rock” series forms the core of this exhibition, reflecting Zhan Wang’s thinking towards tradition and modernity. Since 1995, the artist has been creating artificial replicas of “scholar’s rocks” (jiashanshi) by pounding, molding and bending stainless steel around the surface of the rock. After the steel has been shaped, it is peeled away in sections, and welded together to form a single hollow sculpture, seamlessly merging a traditional literati object with a distinctly modern material. This exhibition will include the “Floating Island of Immortals”, a massive sculptural installation approaching ten meters, as well as a floating stainless steel sculpture held aloft through magnetic levitation.

The title “Garden Utopia” articulates the traditional perspective of a Chinese garden as a place of contemplation, a borderland between reality and fantasy to escape the trappings of the modern world. Through a re-appropriation of natural materials, Zhan Wang’s work fills a spiritual need for reconnecting humanity with nature. It is this traditional aesthetic that Zhan Wang situates against a violently changing Chinese society, examining the tensions between landscape and industrialization, tradition and modernity. The sculptural and photographic series “Urban Landscape” presents a contemporary garden. From an elevated periphery, the audience peers at a topographic model of Beijing’s landscape composed of reflective stainless steel kitchen-ware, taking in the spectacle from stadium style seating. Again, fantasy and appropriation are at play. As opposed to seeking a relationship with nature, this landscape is animated by a lust for materialism.

Another major component of this exhibition is “Deity Medicine”, a nondescript stainless steel pill - the silver bullet of modern society’s malaise. This work comments on the material solution to a spiritual complex in contemporary life, and its adherence to a new religion of technology and science. The reflective surface of the pill refuses to divulge its contents, but the viewer can carryout their own soul searching by tapping into one of the conveniently located “Deity Search Engines”. Aided by modern technology, viewers scroll through a carefully documented list of all known deities in the world. The interconnected terminals allowing viewers to add information about non-listed deities, as well as access what others have uploaded.

Through the blending of different worlds, reality into artifice, artifice into reality, this exhibition references the contemporary spaces we inhabit, presenting utopia as finite and concrete, as well as infinitely mutable and ephemeral.

The conference “Sculptural Intervention” will be held in conjunction with this exhibition. This one-day conference will explore new possibilities for sculpture as a medium that informs and engages other material explorations of the social condition. Zhan Wang will also initiate a new project, “86 Divinity Figures” starting May 13 at Long March Space, Beijing. This one-month project is a site for artistic dialogue between the act of “construction” and “deconstruction” in the transitions from past to present and the future.

Sponsor: Artron

Media Sponsor: YISHU Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art

Documentation: Asian Art Archive

Media Supporters:
Timeout Beijing, Artco, Artmap, Beijing Today, Tom on-line, Sina, Art Value, Artist, Arts2008, HIart, Beijing Youth Weekend, Oriental Art Master, Oriental Art Finance, The First，Fine Arts Literature

Special thanks to: Sculpture research department, Central Academy of Fine Arts

Press contact:
Garden Utopia
Project Office
c/o Long March Space
Tel +86 10 6438 7107
Fax +86 10 6432 3834
press@longmarchspace.com