GATEWAY OF INFINITE WONDERS WANG MAI's GENUINE FALSEHOOD
LuJie

A few years ago, while I was attending an art exhibition at Beijing’s Xidan Bookstore, Wang Mai shoved a piece of coal into my hand. This was my first contact with Wang Mai, or better yet, Wang Mai’s artwork. This was also the first time in all my life that I walked out of a bookstore without buying a book. Rather what I left with was the dirtiest piece of artwork that I have ever encountered. This work is not being shown at this exhibition or in this catalog. I suspect that Wang Mai does not feel that this work is important, but it left a very large impression on me. As I was walking out of the bookstore and heading home, I tried my best to think of the other works exhibited, but I simply could not remember. The transcendence of a piece of coal from a mine to a bookstore and then into a piece of art in my hand made my hand feel intangible and I began to feel the contrast of the neutral color of my hand against the white pages of the books and the blackness of the coal. As a result of this experience, I could only think about how clean coal as art was, and how dirty books as art were. The Xidan Bookstore exhibition wished to make a connection between art and society; as it turns out, the people who were buying the books were not surprised at all at the sudden appearance of art in their midst.

In May 2002, before we started on The Long March - A Walking Visual Display, I stood in front of a room full of artists and media at a Long March meeting held at the Loft in Beijing. As I was prattling away about the Snow Mountains and the Grasslands of the Long March, Zunyi and Yan’an, and fielding questions the artists continually threw at me - most of which were of the sorts such as: Was I leftist or neo-leftist? If I did not give money for materials, then would I give money for transportation? Was the exhibition directed towards a Western audience? - Wang Mai suddenly asked me, “Could it be that there never was a Long March?” The whole room rocked with laughter. Most people thought that he meant our Long March. Afterwards, the proposal that Wang Mai submitted for the Long March once again involved coal; however, this time it was not a piece of coal but a whole pile of it. Today, as I think about Wang Mai’s persistent interrogation of reality, I begin to doubt that Wang Mai and I are neighbors at Factory 798. I am also beginning to doubt the existence of 798 altogether, because when we moved into 798 we already knew that soon we would have to leave.

As the curator for an exhibition of ten years of Wang Mai’s most fundamental works, I suppose it is my responsibility to make some critical comments about his works. Sometimes I wonder what a real art critic might say. I imagine that it would perhaps go something like this…

“Performance pieces constitute a major strand in the early works of Wang Mai. In such works as China Aviation TCCV-59, International Flyer, Weather, It Takes Ten Years for a Tree Trunk to Rot and One Hundred for a Human to Rot, Normalized Behavior, May First International Labor Day, Spring Festival Variety Show, Rotten Chinese Language, and Secret Chinese Language, Wang Mai attempts to use the actions of his body to make the enormous social institutions portrayed in these works become weightless to the point of nothingness. Only in the media realm of the television set under his feet is the world real, and flying machines are really just the wrappings of thought. In It Takes Ten Years for a Tree Trunk to Rot and One Hundred Years for a Human to Rot and Normalized Behavior, the good deeds of Wang Mai’s performance is the type of action and sincerity that we have come to expect of socially conformed people. The good deeds performed by an altruistic young Wang Mai might require an entire lifetime to accomplish for some of us, but in his work they all occur in one picturesque afternoon. The crux of the issue is not if his actions are socially normal, nor is it if his actions are real or not, the key issue is whether he accomplishes these actions in time. The expression of the condition of time in this work highlights the need for Wang Mai’s “normalized behavior.” We do not need to think about whether to act or not, or if we can fulfill it well. If there is a need for good deeds, then Wang Mai is inevitably there to fulfill it. The temporal implications of behavior are further articulated in the timeless nature of the social institutions Wang Mai represents in the works May First International Labor Day and Spring Festival Variety Show. The works are not a misappropriation and ridicule of such rituals, or even the wise cracking type of expression that we are accustomed to seeing in the artworks from the late 1980’s and early 1990’s. It is even less a nostalgic praise of these social customs. Rather, it is an imitation of the actions of social institutions that calls into question the authenticity of such rituals through simulation. A dress rehearsal becomes the actual show, and the show in turn is not actually recorded. Singing together and reunion first become artistic forms and then these forms simply become the contents in themselves. These works are different from Wang Mai’s understanding of the Chinese language. In works such as Secret Chinese Language and Rotten Chinese Language, speech is hidden and corrupted. The audiences strains to hear voices that are not audible, but they only succeed in seeing the words take on the movements of the body in space. Because the power of speech is not used, it overflows with public nature. The actions of speech and narration become the behavior of the body, which in turn engulfs the body in the public space…”

Compared to the cynical and creatively lacking artists from his generation, Wang Mai does not simply interject doubt into the relationship between discourse and objects; rather he more thoughtfully changes direction and doubts doubt. He surprisingly says that, “history both inherently has and lacks a concept of time.” This idea, is thoroughly expressed in his two dimensional works. Allow me to continue imagining what words a critic might use to describe Wang Mai’s “fake paintings…”

“In works such as Viewer Window Displays, Global Platform, Cloned Family, The Charm of Leaders, and Outdoor Antenna, the strong expressionist elements of his paintings create a feeling of alienation and individualization that cause people to think about further possibilities of the form. His ability to harmonize both restraint and spontaneity in his paintings renders our anxiety towards paintings into joy. However, many often overlook the relationship between the people and things that continuously appear and extends throughout all mediums of Wang Mai’s work (be it painting, performance or photography). The contradictions between what is said and what is done are mostly expressed in the objectified linguistic symbols and the standardized viewership created by television, advertisements, and window displays. In reality, it is the creator that is the real audience. We astoundingly see that this type of alternation in fact makes reading and understanding a possibility. It is the combination of people and media that makes the medium, and they perform and show themselves together. The human subjectivity is replaced by the media and this entire process in turn is represented by the medium of Wang Mai’s choosing. Wang Mai comments on his work in this way: “In form and speech, my work almost always selects to simulate reality and the psychological level of society. This comes closest to the oppositional relationship between the picture screen reality portrayed by the media and illusory reality.” Do not believe him, this is a lie, like a piece of liquid coal. With regards to falsehood, Wang Mai’s understanding is primarily conveyed in the usage of symbolic contracts. Real fakeness and fake realness are juxtaposed. Emperor Hui Zong at 798 brings into play another type of deception. Wang Mai is one of the rare artists from his generation that is well versed in traditional calligraphy, painting, and poetry - this young fellow who normally does performance and installations actually has the four essentials of a Chinese scholar (brush, ink stick, ink slab, and paper). But the humanistic and traditional mood in his ink-wash paintings, and the phrase about the “poetic idyllic nature” of his work that he had the audacity to write in this catalog in his notes, are another falsehood regarding existence, records, and collecting. He uses Emperor Hui Zong at 798, this blatant lie, that allow us, for an instant, to see through his desire to cover the fact what he creates are “false paintings.” The paintings seem to use the traditional style. They come out naturally, headstrong and airy the ink spreads in a dizzying series of brush strokes. But actually the paintings use the elaborate technique of New Years calendars, with their air brushed magic. Like traditional ink-wash, the paintings include short comments as well as seals. However, unlike the seals of ancient paintings that were added by the collector after receiving the work as an authentication of its value, in Wang Mai’s work, these elements are completely a part of the painting. It is because Wang Mai himself places seals on his own paintings, thus implying the process of artistic receiving and endorsement are the same as creation, that it appears as if he is using “self-collection” to reject collection. In reality, he is looking for someone to collect the entire process. Thus, Wang Mai’s understanding of art and history are the similar; they concentrate on the power of market collection. This is the same type of market power that we either prostrate ourselves to or reject, but he slyly uses demands against collection to be collected. He craftily puts it in this way: “Utilizing the connective nature of performance, installation, as well as two dimensional works to supplement one another is what I myself call ‘holistic art.’ I pay particular attention to the differences between the language of my works and those of other artists, including visual perspective and materials. I strive to take make a combination that excites people from the materials that we are familiar with in everyday life. Thus to make the concept of the work accompany the extension of the visual to the psychological…”

The reason why I must resort to imagining what a critic would say about Wang Mai’s work and not say anything substantial myself is because I am the curator of this exhibition. I reminisce of the old Chinese art exhibition system in which it was the job of the critics, not the curator, to write articles. But curating uses selection as a means of critique. It is similar to writing an article, but the former emerges in a space using visual relationships and materials, while the latter is choosing words to fill in the blanks. Thus, being a curator has the advantage of allowing one to better work with the relationship between different artworks, the relationship between artist and viewer, and the relationship between artwork and space…

The difference between this generation of cross medium artists, who Wang Mai is a representative of, and the before and after 1989 “I don’t believe it” crowd, is not only that Wang Mai dabbles in different mediums in order to achieve his so called “holistic art.” Wang Mai also expands from their superficial social critic by playing on the borders between individual and society and mixing up the relationship between media and medium. Whereas the “I don’t believe” artists still preserved a link to authenticity – as if there still exists an ontological truth that is being obscured – Wang Mai goes a step further by saying that “I don’t believe that I don’t believe.” This point becomes ever more evident in his recent “fake vogue paintings.” Uday and his Blonde Girlfriends, Winter in Baghdad, Baghdad Nights, and Peninsula Broadcast Station, these works make people feel cheated because they feign to be vogue without being vogue at all. This group of two dimensional works are not installations nor are they paintings. The flashy starlit skies of a war torn nation that we are asked to mount makes us wonder if, in our age, it is possible for tragic situations to exist anymore. As visual images become more real than reality, the beautification of all visual images signifies the ultimate end. The familiarity of symbols and their banality have alienated the actions of language. The sequences and borders in the process of ritualization have been smeared like the ever changing pagodas of Wang Mai. That Wang Mai is particularly enamored with the pagoda structure can be seen in his works Turned 180 Degrees, Treasured Pagoda on the Mountain Top, and Memorial Stele Enters Pagoda. A pagoda, whether looked at from an aesthetic meaning or a religious meaning, is still a value judgment. Today, the meaning behind the pagoda has long since disappeared. The pagoda as a structure has vanished as well; it only exists in the continuously changing background that sometimes contradicts the original meaning and sometimes has absolutely nothing to do with it. When later generations look at a pagoda, the pagoda is already made; it is an antique with entertainment value. Wang Mai adds another loop in this process by copying the pagoda; fashioning some of these “new antiques” out of scavenged wood, inverting and suspending others, even breaking them in two. The reproduction of these no longer existent structures establishes a relationship between the present and the past, albeit a lost a distorted one that no longer bears any resemblance to the original. The relationship between humankind and time will always exist in this outrageous process of copying and change.

Wang Mai proves that art is easy…that art isn’t really anything, it is nothing at all.

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