Wei Guangqing
dal 11/4/2000 al 26/4/2000
Segnalato da
11/4/2000
Wei Guangqing
ShanghART Gallery, Shanghai
'The Extended Virtuous
Words', originally
named 'Old Virtuous
Words' and 'Old Time
Virtuous Words' or
briefly 'The Extended'. It
is not known who first
wrote them and when.
It is said that the
original version was
compiled by a scholar
in the mid Ming
Dynasty, and then
added by later people.
It became very popular
ever since the late Qing
Dynasty, and
penetrated into every
corner of the society. It
is said 'Reading THE
EXTENDED makes one articulate'. The terse, easy reading,
memorable verses were taken by many as a life-time asset.
It consists of sayings from all walks of life and different kinds
of styles, including religious and secular, governing and
reclusive, and sayings for officials, farmers, workers and
business people; the styles vary from elegant to vulgar, direct
to implied, persuasive to deterring, and the old to the trendy
languages. (from the catalogue)
Wei Guangqing, born 1963, lives and works in Wuhan. Since
1988 he participated at many exhibitions around the world,
including 'Global Conceptualism: Points of Origin' in the
Queens Museum of Art (http://www.queensmuse.org), Brooklyn, last year.
If Wei Guangqing's Hong Qiang (Red Wall) paintings seem
oddly static, even banal at first glance, look again, for things
are not as simple as they appear to be. A master of
conceptual disjunction, Wei eschews lyric effect for a quiet
subversion that nudges gently at the moral or ideological
systems that imprison our thoughts. Atop the Wuhan
painter's signature Pop wall, Confucian ideals falter into
kitsch, symbols topple into deconstructed signs, and
representation is routed, nakedly, into just another formal
system.
Like many of his contemporaries, Wei - who studied oil
painting at the Zhejiang Academy of Fine Arts --has taken on
the project of welding Western modern art to traditional
Chinese painting, to forge together two seemingly disparate
traditions on the pictorial plane. Unlike many of them, the
artist steadily rejects expressions of the self to recycle the
recycled, in the best of postmodern tradition, seeking to
illuminate the conventions we live by. Seven years ago, he
happily hit upon the red brick wall in the artistic scramble for
a visual trademark (so necessary for marketing one's
oeuvre in these logo-laden times), and since then, has
painted variations on top of the theme of its grid.
Striking, often surreal, juxtapositions of a repertoire of
readymade images, sliding from the primly moralistic to the
unabashedly pornographic, set forth a visual map of a
historically walled-off nation that flirts, at times, with
modernity on the surface, but remains impervious to
penetration below.
Fellow artists from Cai Guoqiang to Wang Jin onward, to be
sure, have seized on the icon of the wall for its richness as a
symbol of tradition-bound or new consumerist China (not
least the Great Wall, for site-specific performances). But
Wei's particularly cerebral rendition of the wall is concerned,
not so much with the object itself as with the concept of the
wall, even as it manages the tricky feat of being both Pop icon
and ancient Chinese moral symbol, both representation of
the prison of China and prism that illuminates the prison of
convention. Even the English word China, tacked a bit
facetiously at the bottom of most of the red wall paintings in
white block letters, turns resolutely mysterious after viewed
for the third or fourth time, hinting that the concept of China
is as much linguistic as it is one determined by outside
perception, however false such a definition may be.
In Wei's newest 12-painting series Zeng Quang Xian Wen
(Virtuous Words), a popular Qing Dynasty children's primer of
the same title is set forth, enlarged, in its entirety, but while
the pictorial tableaux remains virtually unaltered, the original
text that accompanied the sketches has been tiled up with
red bricks.... (Grace Fan)
ShanghART
Shanghai,
CN China