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Artist depicts life using little people
By Xu Wenwen |
July 19, 2011, Tuesday
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Print Edition
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THE current dean of the design department of Zhejiang University recently exhibited artworks at a prestigious cultural event held in Italy. Xu Wenwen meets the artist whose experiences studying in Germany have had a profound influence on his work.
Artist Wang Xiaosong who recently returned to Hangzhou from the ongoing 54th Venice Biennale exhibition is quite satisfied with his achievement at the prestigious cultural event, where dozens of people have already ordered parts of a large installation by him.
His 75-meter-long artwork named "The Creating of Life" is hung along a corridor of Convento Del Santo Spirito, a convent in Venice, and the venues for Venice Biennale parallel exhibition, "Cracked Culture? The Quest for Identity in Contemporary Chinese Art," which invited 13 Chinese artists and two Italian artists.
Wang, 44, currently dean of the design department of Zhejiang University, is one of the 13 Chinese artists, and he created the installation exclusively for the exhibition.
The piece is comprised of tens of thousands of red human-shaped pieces tangled on a long rope, in which more than 30 mini speakers are hidden, broadcasting voices that were randomly recorded from TV by the artist.
The human-shaped pieces are made of insulating plastics, and despite the large number of those pieces, the postures of the minute people vary.
"We humans are like those little red people, living in different conditions, and the mixed voices played by tens of speakers are like information that disturbs our lives," explains Wang.
"Seemingly, that information creates our lives, but how could a life be created by something created by human beings?" he says of the origination of the piece's name "The Creating of Life."
After the exhibition, the artwork will be divided into 75 pieces (each extends 1 meter), installed into crystal boxes and sold separately.
So far, nearly half of the 75 pieces have been ordered.
Wang brought two paintings, a video and created the installation in Venice especially for the parallel exhibition. All of them feature "little people" - a typical image in Wang's artworks since 2007.
In his painting "Rotted Prosperity," hundreds of little people contort and crawl on canvas in the color of royal purple, while to the bottom left, a cavity is rotting, uncovering the truth under the sumptuous appearance - evildoers.
"Those are real specimens of evildoers," Wang says. "And I want to show that evildoers have an outer form after death, even though people that decay after death do not have it."
Wang provides an ending for his little people - falling into the holes they dig.
"Everybody is digging a hole for him or herself," he says. "In the painting, some are digging, some have partially fallen into the hole, and some are already in the hole."
The "hole" and the "fall" themes can be seen in his series of paintings named "Kernel" created since 2007.
'Kernel' series
All the paintings in this series are in one color, comprised of thousands of little people, and feature a slot in the middle, around which little people contort, swarm and eventually fall into.
Before the little people series, Wang created a similar series called "messy code," showing how messy codes, symbolizing massive and messy information on the Internet, influence people's life.
"I learnt about tension and pessimism from my living and learning experiences in Germany," he says, explaining how he arrived in Berlin in 1990 to study visual communication at Berlin University of the Arts, where he was shocked by the alien culture and ideology.
"In the late 1980s while I studied art in schools in China, I was educated to be realistic and to focus on working on drawing skills," he says. "But when I arrived in Germany, I was taught to be free to express my own ideas."
Another thing that baffled his initial years in Germany was his poverty. "The first time I went to Germany, to save money, I took six days and switched five trains to get to Berlin," he recalls.
Luckily, Wang soon got used to the new study style, which drove him from a realistic painter to an abstract one, while the poverty he suffered inspired him to create more artworks.
During his life in Germany from 1990 to 2003, Wang created many artworks about his living in a foreign land. "Solo Monologue," "Torn Soul" and "Puzzle" are some of the titles of his work that exemplify his solitude and the culture shock he encountered.
And this sort of emotion has been recurring in his succeeding works, not only in paintings but in installations.
In 2007, Wang set more than 1,000 plastic basins afloat in the Suzhou River in Shanghai for three hours to promote environmental protection.
The basins symbolized the waste from the factories going into the river, and many of the basins were blue which represented blue algae.
"I am naturally an artist, and almost all of my artworks are thought-provoking, which is an artist's responsibility."
Artist Wang Xiaosong who recently returned to Hangzhou from the ongoing 54th Venice Biennale exhibition is quite satisfied with his achievement at the prestigious cultural event, where dozens of people have already ordered parts of a large installation by him.
His 75-meter-long artwork named "The Creating of Life" is hung along a corridor of Convento Del Santo Spirito, a convent in Venice, and the venues for Venice Biennale parallel exhibition, "Cracked Culture? The Quest for Identity in Contemporary Chinese Art," which invited 13 Chinese artists and two Italian artists.
Wang, 44, currently dean of the design department of Zhejiang University, is one of the 13 Chinese artists, and he created the installation exclusively for the exhibition.
The piece is comprised of tens of thousands of red human-shaped pieces tangled on a long rope, in which more than 30 mini speakers are hidden, broadcasting voices that were randomly recorded from TV by the artist.
The human-shaped pieces are made of insulating plastics, and despite the large number of those pieces, the postures of the minute people vary.
"We humans are like those little red people, living in different conditions, and the mixed voices played by tens of speakers are like information that disturbs our lives," explains Wang.
"Seemingly, that information creates our lives, but how could a life be created by something created by human beings?" he says of the origination of the piece's name "The Creating of Life."
After the exhibition, the artwork will be divided into 75 pieces (each extends 1 meter), installed into crystal boxes and sold separately.
So far, nearly half of the 75 pieces have been ordered.
Wang brought two paintings, a video and created the installation in Venice especially for the parallel exhibition. All of them feature "little people" - a typical image in Wang's artworks since 2007.
In his painting "Rotted Prosperity," hundreds of little people contort and crawl on canvas in the color of royal purple, while to the bottom left, a cavity is rotting, uncovering the truth under the sumptuous appearance - evildoers.
"Those are real specimens of evildoers," Wang says. "And I want to show that evildoers have an outer form after death, even though people that decay after death do not have it."
Wang provides an ending for his little people - falling into the holes they dig.
"Everybody is digging a hole for him or herself," he says. "In the painting, some are digging, some have partially fallen into the hole, and some are already in the hole."
The "hole" and the "fall" themes can be seen in his series of paintings named "Kernel" created since 2007.
'Kernel' series
All the paintings in this series are in one color, comprised of thousands of little people, and feature a slot in the middle, around which little people contort, swarm and eventually fall into.
Before the little people series, Wang created a similar series called "messy code," showing how messy codes, symbolizing massive and messy information on the Internet, influence people's life.
"I learnt about tension and pessimism from my living and learning experiences in Germany," he says, explaining how he arrived in Berlin in 1990 to study visual communication at Berlin University of the Arts, where he was shocked by the alien culture and ideology.
"In the late 1980s while I studied art in schools in China, I was educated to be realistic and to focus on working on drawing skills," he says. "But when I arrived in Germany, I was taught to be free to express my own ideas."
Another thing that baffled his initial years in Germany was his poverty. "The first time I went to Germany, to save money, I took six days and switched five trains to get to Berlin," he recalls.
Luckily, Wang soon got used to the new study style, which drove him from a realistic painter to an abstract one, while the poverty he suffered inspired him to create more artworks.
During his life in Germany from 1990 to 2003, Wang created many artworks about his living in a foreign land. "Solo Monologue," "Torn Soul" and "Puzzle" are some of the titles of his work that exemplify his solitude and the culture shock he encountered.
And this sort of emotion has been recurring in his succeeding works, not only in paintings but in installations.
In 2007, Wang set more than 1,000 plastic basins afloat in the Suzhou River in Shanghai for three hours to promote environmental protection.
The basins symbolized the waste from the factories going into the river, and many of the basins were blue which represented blue algae.
"I am naturally an artist, and almost all of my artworks are thought-provoking, which is an artist's responsibility."
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