Can i cooperate with you wang qingsong

These new works will be very helpful in keeping Chinese contemporary art in focus for a long time. Also, the Chinese government is promoting Chinese contemporary art and many private collectors are collecting Chinese contemporary art. Can I Cooperate with You? Do you see any positive effects? I don't think Western culture or tradition is bad, it's just that it isn't always compatible with the Chinese environment. As the Chinese saying goes, each carrot should have its own pit. There are many Western ideas that are good in Western countries but not suitable for other countries.

CK: You also say that you think of yourself as both a journalist and photographer. What do you think of the statement 'art for art's sake'? WQS: I think it is very meaningless if an artist only creates art for art's sake. For me, the dramatic changes in China have transformed China into a huge playground or construction site. Whenever I go into the city I feel suffocated by the pollution, social contradictions, and so forth. All of these factors contribute to the fact that artists cannot just make art for art's sake.

I think it would be absurd for an artist to ignore what's going on in society. CK: Many of your works refer to famous images from the West and from the East. For example, Courbet, Ingres and traditional Chinese painting. Do you think new Chinese art will also impact art in the West? For myself, I refer to other art works, like in The Night Revels of Lao Li where I made reference to the 10th century , not for the importance or fame of certain works.

For intellectuals, the tragic situations of humanity never change and that is what I am critiquing. As for making references to figures and paintings by Courbet and Ingres, I am not interested in those works because they are masterpieces either. I'm more interested in those figures as human beings and inviting those figures into my own work. Are there significant regional distinctions among these locations that influenced your work? WQS: I think there are many regional distinctions that I have incorporated into my art.

For example, being born in Heilongjiang Province, I remember a lot of Soviet tanks going around when I was three. At that time, China had a confrontation with the Soviet Union.

When we moved to Hubei Province, many people were assigned there to work on an oil field that used to be a swamp. In Sichuan, I was in one of the most populous cities in the world and the most important memories were of all the itinerant peasant workers from Chongqing. Then, in , the huge urbanization strive in Beijing also impacted my art.

All of these experiences have given me a lot of inspiration. CK: As someone who abandoned painting in favour of photography, what do feel can be accomplished with photography that cannot be accomplished with painting? WQS: At the beginning when I made so-called photoworks in , I didn't really consider my works photoworks. I had refused to admit my works were photos, but that was the time when Chinese photography started to appear along with new media and new photography.

In , one critic wrote an article for an exhibition that described my art as photoworks. This produced highly individual artistic responses with a politicized sense of directness and urgency in their expression.

Many artists became subversive and used kitsch and satire as devices of critique. The exhibition of works by twenty artists from China at the 48th Venice Biennale in put Chinese contemporary art firmly on the international map; and in the exhibition at the Centre Pompidou, Paris, Alors, la Chine?

Opening up the country resulted in the bewildering paradox of seductive Western capitalist exports global brands, advertising, its associated glamour and affluence , combined with local, centuries-old traditions and the powerful shadow of the Communist regime. Many of the most inventive and younger artists in China chose to work with photography and video because of the versatility and instantaneous nature of these media that mirrored the rapidity of change in the country.

It does not have the same reliance on the cult of the fine black and white print to signal serious or poetic intent. Instead, in the mids, exciting developments in the fields of appropriation from advertising and propaganda, alongside performance-oriented body art, became a driving force. Many artists gathered in Beijing and had come, like Wang Qingsong, from the provinces.

These projects had a profound impact on Chinese art of the next decade. Large colour photographs documenting ephemeral body art performances emerged or constructing realities based on daily life as a distinctive practice. It highlighted the scope and vividness of contemporary photography that had emerged from China in the decades following its remarkable economic, social and cultural transformation.

Many of the works combined optimism and excitement with a sense of anxiety at the breathless pace of change. His break-through photograph, Night Revels of Lao Li, , joined them when it was later acquired by the museum. Staged photography reaches back to the invention of the medium, and flourished up until around the late s.

This phenomenon can be explained through a combination of factors: technical requirements of long exposures with early negatives that could not capture movement in action; the Victorian penchant for amateur dramatics and narrative tableaux vivants; and the need for photographs to imitate the compositions of paintings to gain validity as a fine art.

Exposure times increased, and photography gained its own validity distinct from painting in the snapshot aesthetic, so tableaux photography declined. Aside from within fashion, staged photography fell out of favour for nearly one hundred years, but was revived in Europe and North America from the s as a device used deliberately in conceptual and performance art. It also served postmodern ideas that called attention to the artifice of photography, revealing its visual methods, construction and ideologies.

As we have seen, in China, staged photography arose predominantly out of video and performance art alongside a familiarity with the grand productions of Communist propaganda imagery. Yet it also chimed with similar approaches, albeit derived from differing impulses and sources, in the west. As a result, Chinese staged photography, with Wang Qingsong at its forefront, arrived in the late s to a receptive western audience and an art market that recognized its visual codes but delighted in its difference.

It encapsulates the range of his most important themes: the legacy and survival of ancient art and culture in present day China Requesting Buddha No. The artist amply describes and explains in his own words the meanings behind the individual works in the texts that accompany the reproductions in this book. Devastatingly effective in their critique, his images are imbued with the acute quality of reverse propaganda. You can read into press photographs.

He is a reporter-artist, a kind of jester or wise fool, who taps into the essence of topical issues through strategies of exaggeration and dark humour, through the imaginative rather than the specific. He does this in a manner that reminds me of the acerbic and humorous eighteenth-century British satirist artists, Thomas Rowlandson or William Hogarth.

Wang Qingsong has a similar facility with his cast of characters. They often appear like models in dioramas, and the artist himself can sometimes be seen as a protagonist looking on, or performing within, his own images. Wang Qingsong positions himself therefore simultaneously as a maker, manipulator, performer and an astute observer.

Over the last twenty years, experimental artists have consistently responded to the drastic changes taking place in China: large-scale internal migration, the disappearance of traditional landscapes and lifestyles, the rise of mega-cities, the indulgence of consumer fantasies, a widening distance between rich and poor, and new urban cultures.

Sprawling skyscraper cities have been created almost overnight, while historic urban centres have been utterly demolished, displacing tens of thousands of city dwellers. Although demolition and relocation were necessary to the much-needed urban modernization, the resulting social structure and its accompanying consumer culture have arguably brought about a growing alienation between the city and its residents.

Wang Qingsong is one of the most powerful commentators on this recent situation in China.