王兴伟个展
Ullens Center for Contemporary Art, 798 Art District, Beijing
May 19 – August 18, 2013
Wang Xingwei is a difficult case. He is very good at the technique of painting. He uses this skill to evade any definitions. Appropriating, copying and mashing up styles is his style: Thomas Kinkade hangs next to Caspar David Friedrich next to Auguste Renoir next to Yue Minjun. His style is not just cut-up collage. He does not cut up images, but he cuts up styles, randomly moving between them. There seems to be little relation between the subject matter and chosen style. The exhibition as a whole than feels almost like some generative experimental poem transposed into visual form: It seems that random combinations of style and subject could go on forever. However, is that really the case?
The disorientation created by different artistic styles is maybe just a veil under which the narrative injected into the painting itself takes place. Maybe this guise is an internalized reaction to the Chinese environment which is without a style today, even though it had one for quite a long time: First it was the literati tradition of ink painting, fixed through hundreds of years, slowly evolving, but never abruptly changing. Then there was the social realist style of the second half of the twentieth century. In between, during the first half of the 20th century, as well as now, there were periods when any style is/was possible: Periods of ‘learning from the West’ where style were/are mashed up in the same way postmodernism mashes up ideas: Anything stumbled upon in the ruins of art history can be taken and made use of.
The only point of reference left is individual subjectivity – an individual’s own desires. Even in its randomness, the sum of Wang’s paintings does converge to a certain set of topics or reference points: Art historical, historical, personal… It becomes a psychoanalyst’s job to interpret the motivations behind each of the paintings. It is quite clear that the paintings are steered by Wang’s personal desires as well as emotional reactions to the society that surrounds him. But what exactly there desires and emotions are, how exactly they can be spelled out, remains a mystery.
