Huang Du: We got to know each other in Sydney, Australia in 1998. I was invited there as curator of the Chinese section of the Sydney Biennale. That was where I saw your work Two from One (1997). It seems to me that that work served as a foundation for much of your later work, such as Big Underpants. So how did you discover the form for this work, and what did this mean for your art?
Wang Zhiyuan: The key theme of Two from One was flux. That idea was embedded in the work's format. It could be varied depending where it was hung. I call it "fragmented wall sculpture". The work itself is composed of numerous parts that could be grouped and regrouped in many different ways. The final arrangement could be very small or very large, and the position of each part in relation to the whole could also be changed. Each part was made on flat wooden board, plastic or sheet metal. So the medium could also be varied. It's the same with my recent work Super Large Underpants. The difference is that in that work the component parts are larger. So the advantage of this form is that it can be developed continuously.
Because of the flexibility in grouping the work, its meaning is not fixed. The meaning an artist expresses through his or her work changes depending on the audiences and their various perspectives. A work can evoke many interpretations, including so-called "wrong" ones. Actually, as soon as an artist has completed a work, he should have no relationship with it, or his or her relationship should be exactly the same as any other viewer's. It could also be said that no work has a fixed meaning, that all of the artist's efforts to instill a meaning into the work are in vain. My fragmented wall sculpture set out to vitiate any fixed meaning; I intended from the start to instill not meaning but meaninglessness into the work. All I created were fragments. When these parts are installed by different curators in different groupings, the form and thus the meaning of the work vary greatly.
The ability to change the work's form at will, with no ultimate goal in terms of meaning, reflects the conditions of modern life: as we change our location, habits, reading and experiences, we also change. As the ancient Greek philosopher Heraclitus (c. 535–c. 475 BCE) said, we cannot step into the same river twice. In today's information society, we can say this another way: A given river cannot be stepped into more than once by the same person.
The origin of the "fragmented wall sculpture" concept had much to do with my experience living in Australia as an immigrant. Milan Kundera's novel The Incredible Lightness of Being had special resonance for me, because living abroad for so long gave me a sense both of floating without an anchor and of being lacerated, totally exposed. The "fragments" in my sculptures also float or drift, both on the wall itself and in terms of cultural content. The shapes arose both from memories of my native culture and from the completely new and strange environment in Australia. When I discovered this format, I knew at once that it was the perfect vehicle for my sense of being cast adrift. It could be said that all the work I have created since then has been an extension of this concept. I am no longer an emigrant, but the "fragmented wall sculpture" still reflects my life in the floating world of globalisation.
Huang Du: So the fragmented form is also in sync with people's psychological state today: floating, nomadic, in constant flux.
Wang Zhiyuan: Yes. Being fragmented and nomadic is a kind of mood as well as a real experience. As a matter of fact, it could be extended into many contemporary cultural phenomena. For instance, computers affect every aspect of our lives, images crowd in on us from all sides, and people move more frequently than ever before. All this means we have access to vastly more information. We live in an ocean of information. This both negates our sense of cultural belonging and creates a sense of hybridisation between cultures.
The reason I continue to make "fragmented wall sculptures" is that the form is so appropriate to me as a maker. I not only create the form; it adapts to and coincides with the contemporary Zeitgeist. Unless an art form does that, it cannot survive. Many artists create a form and then stick to it unchanged for twenty years. This is just misguided. It belongs to the 20th-century truth, which in the 21st century has become falsehood. Anything an artist creates should coincide with the broad currents of contemporary cultural life. If it doesn't, it is not only unable to convey the conditions of today but is bound to be short-lived as well.
Huang Du: Your work Two from One was also intended as a reflection on Daoist philosophy. The work uses no Chinese symbols, and its visual language does not come from Australian or even Western abstraction. Instead it is imbued with folk and Aboriginal aesthetics. It is in this outsider, non-mainstream approach that its inspirational effect lies. So did you set out to resist the dominant culture? Does a non-Western art system have its own rationale, its own energy?
Wang Zhiyuan: The impact of the West makes it very difficult to challenge "contemporary art" values. In Two from One, I was trying to construct a different visual language. The place where I was born and grew up, my language and customs, are very different from anything in the West. In uniting Western art theories with a language specific to ourselves, are we still making "contemporary art"? Can something from Asian culture be on an equal footing with Western contemporary art? I have been greatly influenced by reading about complexity theory, which holds that traditional linear thinking cannot fully explain the world. Instead, we need to interpret our lives from multiple angles and through multiple channels. This also applies to art. The core of this idea comes from traditional Chinese Daoism. It led me to rethink everything I have learned from Western art history. If the only way we could distinguish Chinese art from Western art was through obvious symbols, that would be too inflexible. If the standpoint of creation is different from that of Western art, then it is like flowing water. Two from One was an experiment based on this idea. The fundamental principle of Daoism is that "One gives rise to two, two give rise to three, and three give rise to the many." The world began with chaos, from which everything slowly evolves. As I reflected on this, the images in my work appeared in my mind, one after the other.
Huang Du: Why do you combine sculpture, installation and hand-made objects?
Wang Zhiyuan: I am very fond of "non-novel" novels, like Milan Kundera's Testaments Betrayed, a hybrid book but very entertaining, or Leo Tolstoy's Resurrection, which contains many long digressions that to some critics interrupt the story. In the same way, my favorite art is non-art—art that isn't defined by any single medium or technique: sculpture, oil painting, installation, Chinese painting. Two from One and my more recent works The Cross Behind the Underpants, Object of Desire and Purge—are they painting, sculpture, video or craft objects? None of the above, or maybe all of them. The fact that it is impossible to define them with a single term is my fun and my preference. It is also my hope for the future development of contemporary art. I think the practice of defining art works by a single medium should come to an end. The painters of the earliest cave paintings certainly did not think of what they were doing in that way. Maybe they did it only for fun and self-expression. Artworks should employ all possibilities to interact with their viewers. The development of art should be in parallel with all other interdisciplinary industries. My work has appropriated a great variety of media from sound to video, from sculpture to moving installation and neon lights. My goal is to create something that cannot be defined by any single term, to interact with viewers through their eyes, and to stir their emotions.
Huang Du: How do you distinguish your work from that of Jeff Koons in terms of sex and the pornographic aesthetic? In my personal view, Chinese Kinetic Art showcases the attitudes of Chinese intellectuals to morality and ethics. What is your work's relationship with Koons's at this point?
Wang Zhiyuan: Chinese Kinetic Art arose in the mid-90s under the impact of Jeff Koons. He turned middle-class standards of beauty into artworks and sold them back to the same class. It was an ironic challenge to a consumerist society. Chinese pornography is a satire on the Chinese nouveau riche. Between 2003 and 2005, I created a series of works titled Underpants. Their surfaces are painted pink, and they look very pornographic. But they were not intended to satirise the aesthetic of pornography. The works themselves were intended to satirise the morality of viewers by putting improper things in a so-called "proper" place. This was not so much pornography as breaking a taboo.
Huang Du: In 2008, as curator of the Best of Discovery show at ShContemporary, I invited you to exhibit your work. You contributed the enormous work Object of Desire. Its concept of morality or ethics seems to differ from that of your earlier work. Object of Desire looks more like an aesthetic object. It is very difficult to see the moral message that was apparent in your earlier underpants works. In addition, the work's rich colours and sheen and its glittering lights invite readers to ignore all the issues of morals and taboos. These are hidden or implied rather than obvious.
Wang Zhiyuan: The huge size of the work gives meretricious things a sense of grandeur.
Huang Du: Your smaller underpants used very thin material and the colour pink, which made them resemble clothing. Clothing separates our skin from the world around us. The much larger scale of your later underpants makes them less evocative of clothing. The lingerie has completed the transition to a self-contained object. Of course, the connotations of underpants and the idea of sex have not disappeared altogether. But on this grand scale, the functional aspect has been transcended by the aesthetic. The object can be seen solely as an aesthetic one.
Wang Zhiyuan: That sounds very reasonable.
Huang Du: Object of Desire, as an aesthetic object, becomes a comment on our shallow and meretricious lifestyles, the inflation of desire and the pursuit of luxury, and also on political corruption and totalitarianism. On the surface, it portrays vanity and superficiality, but it is a satire or a critique. The vanity and luxuriousness on the surface belie a subtext of unrestrained liberty, or libertinism. Your work uses some very creative media, including neon, LED lights and the songs of the 1930s Shanghai pop singer Zhouxuan. Her voice sounds very elegant and nostalgic, but in recalling a long-vanished time it also evokes a sense of bitterness and regret.
Wang Zhiyuan: It is a contradiction and confrontation between ideology and materialistic desire, just like the contradiction between sex and AIDS.
Huang Du: China today is like a hybrid of capitalism and socialism. Materialism is triumphant over spirituality. Your work depicts the contradiction between faith and its abandonment, the erosion of morality and the expansion of materialistic desire. [Compared with Object of Desire], your very recent works are more plain or natural. For instance, The Cross Behind the Underpants and Purge are related to faith and the loss of faith. By putting underpants and the Cross together—two things that are incommensurate and unconnected—you place morality and religion side by side. Thus you provoke thoughts about the relationship between belief and ethical morality. This work, in terms of its artistic form, concept and visual expression, is brilliant in the way it presents so many contradictory and conflicting ideas. Of course, it is not a narrative of reality. It is still a conceptual work, quite an abstract one. Recently, you created another work titled Cheap Copy Inn.
Wang Zhiyuan: Yes. That work uses neon to display my improper writing of a poem: "The past like dust is gone with the ebb tide,/ the rest of my life, my remaining years go lightly with peace." When I made the work, I was just trying to find a way to express my mood.
Huang Du: I think these pieces show a quite mature stage in your work, since you did not intend to emphasise their visual aesthetic. The force of the social critique is strengthened and enhanced far beyond that of your previous work. What's highlighted is a kind of "dirtiness" or crudeness, enhanced by the use of ready-made materials. The work Purge uses an LED light display that shows moving images of words. These words are all taken from websites, and serve as signifiers for the unbridled materialism of our consumer society. Purge does not imply defecation so much as the expulsion of the waste, the excess of our information society, in which we sustain ourselves on the spiritual excreta of others. It shows us the purging going on beneath the surface of society, the crisis of human spirituality. By using a multiplicity of elements, materials and forms, the work constructs new meanings and forces its readers to revise their preconceptions.
Wang Zhiyuan: An unsolved case.
Huang Du: This provocation of thought is very important in visual art works, because they are unable to solve philosophical or societal issues. Their principal purpose is to allow people to reconsider and contemplate.
Wang Zhiyuan: This is for definitely an issue I am reflecting on. Visual art should delete elements that are purely artificial or decorative, included just to appeal to viewers' senses. But such elements are all right if they are used to reveal something or highlight an unresolved question. In future, I would like do more in the areas of pure cognition and the deep essence of art. I'd like to keep experimenting with ways to express my thinking by minimising decorative elements and using my media more directly.
Huang Du: I think your most recent work shows a greater sense of freedom, naturalness and purity of feeling. The depth and strength of the work are thus enhanced. Your latest work is about more than aesthetic form. Now you bring into greater focus ideas about life and society. But it is very interesting that you arrived at this point from a focus that was very largely aesthetic.
Translated by Jin Hua