Wang Zhiyuan has always had a unique vision. From an early age he sought to apprehend worlds beyond his immediate reach. This sense of inquiry and desire for growth has informed his artistic practice in China and Australia. Born in Tianjin, southeast of Beijing in 1958, the youngest of seven children, Wang Zhiyuan showed artistic inclinations at an early age. Close to his home town of Tianjin is Yangliuqing where an important school of New Year woodblock prints (nianhua) emerged in the early seventeenth century. Yangliuqing prints featuring subjects symbolic of long life and good fortune were used to decorate homes at New Year. These prints, which are characterised by their fine detail and use of bright and pastel colours, are among Wang Zhiyuan's most favourite artworks and have exterted a significant influence on his artistic development.
Wang attended the Craft High School in Tianjin from 1975 to 1978 and after graduation was assigned to work as an art editor, doing black and white book illustration and design work, at the One Hundred Flowers Literature and Art Publishing House. In 1980, having sat for and passed the entrance examination of the prestigious Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing, Wang Zhiyuan entered the printmaking department where he studied for four years. Printmaking was perhaps a fortuitous choice. Many of the most interesting artists to have survived the mind numbing rigors of academic and political instruction during those years and gone on to gain an international reputation are graduates of that department. Some of the better known artists include Xu Bing, Fang Lijun, Liu Wei and Feng Mengbo.
Print making had less cultural baggage than brush and ink painting or oil painting. Whilst print making has a long tradition within China, it is strongly associated with folk art and the craft of artisans. In the early and mid twentieth century woodblock printing became an important part of revolutionary culture owing to its use of simple tools and cheap materials and its inherent ability to mass-produce images. In the first year of the course students learnt a variety of different techniques - woodblock printing, water-ink printing, lithography, etching, silk screen and monotype printing. The emphasis was on technique and process as much as it was on form and content. Students were less precious about their work and creating multiple images, artworks were readily exchanged. There were no 'great masters' in the department that students felt obliged to defer to or emulate and the atmosphere was more conducive to experimentation than anywhere else in the academy. Wang Zhiyuan specialised in woodblock printing but like many students in the department he also experimented with water colour and oil painting.
In 1982 Wang Zhiyuan, then a second year student, won the gold prize in the annual student exhibition for the work Wild flower, 1982, an ink rubbing on paper. The rubbing shows a young girl sitting on the grass with her legs outstretched and a baby boy on her lap. The girl prods at a wild flower. The figures and flower have been carved in relief and reserved against a cut-away ground. Wang Zhiyuan has gouged the wood block to indicate grass and its movement in the spring wind. Paper has been pressed onto the wood block to take the carved design, and the raised lines of the figures and flower have been daubed with ink. In the final print it is shadow that animates the white-on-white ground. Influenced by the figurative wood block prints by the individualistic late Ming dynasty artist Chen Hongshou (1598-1652), and conveying an ironic interpretation of the socialist compositional formula to make prominent the main subject, Wang has created a very quiet, tender and reflective work.
Wild flower was made after a visit to Shangbali village in Xinxiang county, Henan province. Visits to the countryside to observe and learn from country folk and country life were an integral part of the school curriculum Xinxiang county was visited by Mao Zedong in 1958, the year of Wang's birth, and pronounced a model of agricultural collectivisation. It was here that Mao declared " the people's commune is fine". In Wild flower Wang Zhiyuan sympathises with the young girl who is entrusted with the care of her young brother and therefore prevented from attending school. Her life is hard and she is taken for granted, much like a wild flower (1). This early student work demonstrates Wang Zhiyuan's mastery of realist wood block printing and a quietly critical eye.
After graduation in 1984 Wang was retained as a teacher at the middle school attached to the academy. He felt restricted by the social and academic realist techniques but he was also skeptical of the fad for novel and imported contemporary artistic styles such as dada, pop, surrealism and photorealism which were adopted by so many of his contemporaries, often in an experimental and unthinking way. During the mid to late 1980s examples of these new styles could be seen in books and magazines and in selected exhibitions in Beijing.
Wang's unique vision is more forcefully manifest in a series of animal portraits produced in 1988, some of which were displayed in an exhibition at the China National Art Gallery the following year. In these works it is as if Wang Zhiyuan has entered into the world of the animals. He depicts dogs, cows and sheep with great care and reverence yet in elevating the animals to iconic subject status we see the emergence of a wry and pointed sense of humour. According to Huangfu Binghui " the animals for him were forms of reacting against popular trends while still pointing a way out of the academic rigidity of his training." (2).
In November 1989 Wang Zhiyuan came to Australia as a fee paying English language student. He knew no-one and on arrival at Sydney airport there was nobody to meet him. He was befriended by a Malaysian-Chinese couple who took him to a cheap hotel in Sydney's Chinatown. It was a matter of starting life over again. As Wang has explained "The events of Tiananmen of June 4th 1989 broke down the utopian exploration of contemporary Chinese artists. Facing this reality, many artists including myself subsequently left China for various reasons, including the space to search for and develop artistic forms of expression which would enable them to articulate the new and complex sensitivities which had begun to emerge in them as individuals." (3)
During his first four years in Australia Wang produced very little new work. Despite a solo exhibition at Barry Stern Gallery and his participation in a group exhibition at the University of Sydney in 1991 this period was marked by feelings of dislocation, confusion, cultural isolation and personal loss. In Dog running on a Sydney road (1990) a large black dog stands in the middle of a road on the crest of a hill. It is a suburban street on Sydney's North Shore but there is a sense of imminent danger as the road is obscured and what lies beyond the crest of the hill is unknown. Wang Zhiyuan was born in the year of the dog. This painting is an ironic self-portrait and an interesting transitional work. Subsequent series such as Beauties captured in time (1994) and Sex and Play (1994) reflect a nostalgia for the past, an increasing movement away from realism, and a desire to find an artistic language appropriate to his new life situation.
The five panel canvas Happiness, created in 1996, marks a turning point in Wang's art. Overt references to Chineseness are discarded and flat cut-out figures, stripped of their clothing, gender and history parade across the painting in curious groupings. In addition to the figures there is a dog, lotus and peony flowers and esoteric looking symbols which hint at other systems of thought and belief and which may offer some clue to the future - or to happiness? Many of the motifs conjure resonant associations, but ambiguity and uncertainty prevail. The flat, graphic quality of the figures and the pictorial construction, point to Wang's early training as a printmaker, though Wang also cites Francesco Clemente and Chinese mural painting among his influences (4).
After completing Happiness Wang was struck by the "floating" figures and the incidental nature of the background and observed "Why could I not put these figures on the walls directly, as if they are floating? The wall could be used as the background and these images could be placed freely and at random. With this inspiration in mind, I quickly cut out one piece of work. That work was the first piece of the series of ten wood-board wall sculptures titled Two from one in 1997." (5)
The Two from one plywood sculptures were hung 5 cm from the wall highlighting their new-found freedom. The cast shadow is an integral part of the works and hinted at the existence of another presence or context (6). The title of the series derives from a passage in the Daoist classic Dao de jing by Laozi which refers to the role of Dao in the creation and support of the universe.
"The way [Dao] begets one; one begets two; two begets three; three begets the myriad creatures. The myriad creatures carry on their backs the yin and embrace in their arms the yang and are the blending of the generative forces of the two." (7)
At the heart of Dao is the concept of flux or constant change. Five elements or states of change - earth, fire, wood, metal, water - originate from the myriad creatures and constitute the physical universe. The five elements of Wang Zhiyuan's Two from one series are human body parts, animal body parts, plants (fruit, leaves), air, breath or spirit (clouds);and fire. The way in which they combine gives rise to new and unexpected life forms - a figure with wings emerging from a cloud; a humanoid pig onto whose body fruit has been grafted; a writhing figure, half human and half beast, tripping on a long cord; and a one legged bird perched on a rock with the face of a cherub and the halo of an angel. They are mutant figures which confound the viewer and bring to mind genetic manipulation and the power of computer aided design. The shocking originality of the figures with their crazy silhouettes and the clever use of solid and void speak of regeneration, transformation and flux. Indeed the objects exist as independent units to be configured on the wall in any combination.
Between late 1997 and early 1998 Wang returned to China to spend time with his family and translate the Two from one wall-sculptures into sheet metal. (8) He worked with three assistants at the Tianjin Gold Stack Science Technology Company Limited and created thirt-seven works based on the original Two from one plywood series. Sheet metal interested Wang because it reflects light and takes on the ambience of its context while still retaining its silver-grey colour. Elements could also be easily welded together allowing for greater creative flexibility. This was the first time Wang had worked with others in the realisation of his works. Inspired by Jeff Koons and Andy Warhol he found the experience liberating. Forced to think through the process of production so that others could create works in his own image he reduced the emotional dimension and the element of chance and created a rational system of manufacture.
In 1999 Wang Zhiyuan enrolled in a Master of Arts degree at the Sydney College of the Arts. During the course of 2000 he continued to explore the form of "fragmented wall sculpture". His major work during this period is Fragments which comprises 40 small low-relief wood-board wall sculptures, each one no more than 80 centimetres in diameter. The pieces are made from medium-density fibreboard using hand-held electric tools. They are beautifully crafted with extraordinary detail, and finished with gaudy pale pink, pale blue and yellow acrylic pigment. The work shares some similarities with Two from one. The enigmatic and humorous qualities are still present, though the motifs are quieter and more contained. In Fragments Wang Zhiyuan has appropriated a wide variety of images from the popular domain. Banal, universal and easily recognisable motifs including a plait of hair, underpants, flowers and a cigarette trailing smoke are interspersed with more loaded symbols from Chinese culture, although many with an ironic contemporary twist, such as a monkey bearing a peach, symbolic of longevity, branded with a MacDonald's golden arch; a withered, wise old arhat gesticulating with his finger; and a face within a face bearing the Chinese character ren, meaning humanity. A central element is a faceless Buddha figure trampling on a head, which Wang acknowledges as his own. The figure is inscribed with the words : "I love Australia. Australia loves me. I keep Buddha in my heart. Buddha blesses me. Everyone is an artist. Artists are non-existent . Where am I? I am where I am. I love Australia…"
In Fragments Wang glides with confidence between the past and the present, China and Australia, traditional and modern societies and their cultural products. These disparate images from the artist's memory bank have been commodified for our amusement and contemplation. It is as if the process or cycle of wild artistic transformation has slowed down a little and that Wang Zhiyuan has relaxed into his bi-cultural life, although the search for meaning still continues. In Fragments we can sense Wang's longstanding familiarity with the wood block medium and his great technical skill, but in this work the ephemeral paper rubbing has been discarded and the carved wood block, albeit transformed, returns to centre stage.
Footnotes
(1) Letter from Wang Zhiyuan, 11 July 2001. I would like to thank Wang Zhiyuan for his generous assistance in the preparation of this article and for providing a copy of his research paper submitted for his Maters degree.
(2) Huangfu Binghui, In & out: contemporary Chinese art from China and Australia, exhibition catalogue, Lasalle- SIA College of the Arts, Singapore,1997, p. 66.
(3) Wang Zhiyuan, From painting to wall-sculpture: the case of Wang Zhiyuan, research paper completed in fulfillment of the Master of Visual Arts degree, Sydney College of the Arts, 2000, p. 10.
(4) Ibid, p. 17.
(5) Ibid, p.19.
(6) The ply-wood Two from one wall-sculptures were first exhibited in 'In & out: contemporary Chinese Art from China and Australia' curated by Huangfu Binghui for La Salle-SIA College of the Arts, Singapore in 1997.
(7) Lao Tzu (Laozi), Tao Te Ching (Dao de jing) book two, XLII (transD.C. Lau),: Penguin Books, Hammondsworth, 1963, , p. 103.
(8) The Two from one sheet metal works (1998) were exhibited at the Ray Hughes Gallery, Sydney in 1998 and 1999. Six of these wall sculptures were displayed in a small exhibition at National Gallery of Australia in 2000 and were subsequently acquired by the gallery.
(Claire Roberts is curator of Asian decorative arts and design at the Powerhouse Museum, Sydney. She is a graduate of the brush and ink painting department of the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing, where she studied from 1979-81).
Originally published in ART Asia-Pacific, issue 33, 2002.