Expansive Sculpture

1995 was the first time I came into contact with Zhan Wang’s sculpture when I saw an artificial rock that he had made using stainless steel. I had curated an exhibition of avant-garde art in Beijing called “Open your mouth, close your eyes” and that was the first time that I discovered Zhan Wang’s “artificial rocks”, at the time this small stainless steel rock of his had three stainless steel rods supporting it. If we look at this piece of work today we recognise that it was made at a very early stage of the artist’s practice but it was regarded as the beginning of Zhan Wang’s new artistic creation. So why do I want to introduce this work? Because I believe that through examining this early piece in its embryonic stage it will provide us with greater insight and understanding of the process of change in the artist’s creative ideas.

So how do we understand the artistic concepts behind Zhan Wang’s sculpture? I believe that his art can be summed up by the following three characteristics:

1: It’s relation to traditional aesthetics. The reason that tradition is important is because the artist discovered the invariable energy of traditional sources. This is a question that Chinese contemporary Art constantly confronts: how do we understand tradition? What significance does tradition actually have today? How is tradition transformed (or translated)? In Zhan Wang’s work we can see that he doesn’t treat tradition as something dead or obsolete but rather as a living tradition and moreover something that is closely related to contemporary life. How is this manifested? I believe that Zhan Wang’s work can best be described as existing between tradition and modernity, the past and the future, in the process of “re-conception” that exists between China and the West. From the individual and independent stainless steel artificial rocks of 1995 through to the groups of collected rocks created before and after 2000, they were all translated in this way and have thus created a new language and form.

2. Where the space is concerned, it’s related to the linguistic environment.  While the main works are the stainless steel rocks, Zhan Wang attempts to separate himself from the method of displaying “objectively” which he used originally in NAMOC, to allow for the possibility of experimentally excavating the sculpture from its original setting so it can interact with whatever society it is placed in. This is his artistic piquancy. He created a series called “12 nautical miles: floating rocks” as well as the “Mount Everest Project”, “Filling the Sky” and “Inlaying gold teeth on the Great Wall” etc. These were all sculptures that were actively involved; that is involved in the public sphere. It was the artist’s individual conscience that drove him to do these things in these public spaces. It includes the artist’s work and his ideas about historical spaces, natural spaces and expansion into societal or public spaces. It relates to involvement and intervention, moreover it established the relationship between artistic concept and external environment. So “Inlaying gold teeth on the Great Wall” is related to a dialogue about emphasising and expanding the relationship with historical spaces, while “12 nautical miles” has already surpassed its original premise, and engages with issues of boundaries, realms, freedom, stipulations, convention, and questions of recognising international regions and domestic sovereignty, it illuminates the relationship with societal space.

3. It’s relation with the body and with the spirit. The artist feels that the visual arts can have a therapeutic affect on both the body and the spirit of the viewer. The installation “Buddha Medicine Hall” which was exhibited at the Shanghai Biennial in 2006, as well as 2007’s “Deity Search Engine- ATM” were both extensions of the Buddhist Medicine Sculpture created for the Shiseido institute in Japan in 2003. In fact he took the “Buddha” out of the Chinese medicine and changed it into an installation which possessed even more spatial sense and relational aesthetics (just as with the human body and spirit). He has some other works that are separate from this category. Even though these works are different from his stainless steel artificial rock series, the internal concept is consistent, especially in the installation ‘Buddha Medicine Hall” with its interaction of both the material medicine and the spiritual therapy within the same space. This is a very thought-provoking work, full of the artist’s intuition and wisdom, which was manifested in the way he transforms both the space and the materials he uses, it both inspires the audience and gives them a lot to think about.

It’s precisely based on this view that Zhan Wang’s solo exhibition “Garden Utopia” includes its different subject matter of the city, the garden, the cosmos and the relation between the body and spirit. The intention of Zhan Wang’s sculptural “involvement” can be viewed from two different levels: one is that we can look at the artist’s work from the perspective of individual segments or partial fragments, for example when you enter into the “Urban Landscape” section, what you see is a partial or fragmented scenery, when you see “pill” it’s only a partial or fragmented view. We can also approach the artistic concept as an integral whole, Zhan Wang placed his sculptures according to the layout of NAMOC, and placed things as if he was imagining the building itself as an abstract human body, for example the sculpture outside the building which is like the ‘foot’ section, is also a symbol of gardens. The work “Pill” is displayed in the right hand side of the building in the section that corresponds to an arm and represents religion, belief and the spiritual, on the left side of the exhibition hall is the “Urban Landscape” series, which represents the material world. In the middle of the hall are the floating electromagnetic “five coloured stones” which represent the heart, its like a microcosm; the round hall that is poetically called the “Garden” actually conceals the head, the ideological concept. Therefore the whole exhibition resembles the shape of a human body. Within this significance, Zhan Wang stresses that the concept of “Utopia” is contained within the physiology and is non-political, he doesn’t want to express a place devoid of people but rather to create a living space that is both familiar and strangely poetic.

Here, the artist actually subjectively presented the audience with an exhibition layout in the form of an abstract human body; of course it is impossible for the audience to understand it from this abstract perspective. In any event it is a great display of a body containing a collection of the spirit, the body, the material, microcosm, city etc. I believe that the core and most important part of the exhibition is in the semi-circular hall which contains the “Garden” where the artist employed the aesthetics of “liveable” and “travellable” found in traditional Chinese painting to transform it into something contemporary that the audience could participate in, this is really the essence of “involved” sculpture.

Of course “involved sculpture” is not just related to the connections between the human body, the space or the linguistic environment but also involves the ideological concept of social intervention. This can’t help making us think about Beuys’s “Social Sculpture”, Beuys most important legacy was his intervention in society, moulding the person, he even said “sculpture=people”, that was the essence of his thinking. When he spoke of his own work, he always talked about it in a really interesting way, even commenting that his work accumulating “energy”. Apart from his artistic practice he also considered his social activities as a part of his art. As far as he was concerned, thinking was a way of fermenting? So he carried on continuous dialogues with statesmen, philosophers, students and people from every level of society, and was therefore able to discuss many wide ranging issues.

Beuys’s “Social Sculpture” also stressed that life and art are inseparable, that the entire social life is in fact a work of art. His artistic goal or ideal was to realise “social sculpture” and transform human society into a perfect work of art. In fact the concept of “Social Sculpture” is related to “Expansive Sculpture”, the essence of “Social sculpture” is also established on the foundation of so-called civil society. If you look at China from this perspective, it’s worth reconsidering whether it has true public sculpture. The basic requirements for public sculpture are a civil society founded on a liberal system, if there is no civil society that has cultural space as its foundation then how can you talk about public sculpture? I think Beuys could only have existed in Germany, it was the only place with the foundation of a civil society that would allow him to display his art works and promote his artistic ideas fully and freely. Of course if the prerequisite of a civil society didn’t exist then he would never have existed. In other words Beuys became a legend in precisely these set of civil society conditions.

The direct intervention in society that Beuys proposed also included democracy, but his concept depended on “social sculpture” his work realises the socialisation of sculpture through social politics, that’s why his work is characterised by its abstractness. Zhan Wang has avoided such methods, his works are mostly realised through a combination of historical experience and practice, this method of using force and strength to transform tradition means that his works take advantage of that strength and possess a clear vision, because the images from traditional Chinese gardensare transformed into a new visual experience, so that the audience can still recognise it. If you consider Beuys’s artistic ideas as more obscure because they are about social relations and the individual’s experience, then Zhan Wang has as far as possible avoided this method, making his own artistic language concrete and open, meaning that the exchange between the art and the audience is established as far as possible on a basis of societal interaction and mutual understanding. Just as in his works “Inlaying God Teeth on the Great Wall”, “12 Nautical Miles”, “Mt. Everest” and “Buddha Medicine Hall” apart from their essential elements of artistic intervention in society, the more important thing is that they use the language of concrete, open social interaction, this is a very important facet of equality of understanding.

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