2013.11
W: Wang Sishun   J: Jerome Sans

J: Your work seem going in many direction, how would you describe your art practice ?

W: My work focuses on sculpture, installation, video and other medias, the content expresses personal emotions and social experiences, in general, the artistic language stays independent and uniformed, at the same time I develop and try new things.

J: You have been graduated from sculpture department. How much that influenced your?

W: 8 years studying sculpture had trained me to have an unique familiarity in terms of spatial relations, materials, forms as well as a good control of all the above, as well as a panoramic view of solving problems as they arise. This also answers the question above, when material and medias are too familiar with each other, it will cause me to work in the opposite direction, I will not place them at the core of my art-pieces, they are chosen by my feelings and my concepts.

J: What was your first piece?

W: Photographic, when I flew over the north-pole in 2008 en-route New York, I took a snap-shot of the ocean surface, it was at night and I couldn't see anything, in the end, I took out the film and developed it and named it ‘33000 Feet Above Sea-level,Fahrenheit 81’, this is the TV screens showing the external views of the airplane.

J: Dreams Memory and desires seemed at the center of your work, why ?

W: They are not the center of my work, they are merely a direction, economic rules and production relation are other focuses in my work, but they do have a center, and that is desire. A type of desire that keeps being created and destroyed by the emotions and social economical activities of modern society.

J: What means time for you ?

W: The un-ending of the creation and destruction of desires.

J: What is your Relationship to body ?

W: There are no bodies in my work, only people.
People are a mere symbol and measurement in my works. They are especially so in my work ‘The Wrong Body’， I made a stone sculpture of a human body, and
knocked off its head and placed its head on its hands. The piece comes from one of my dreams, I dreamed of walking in the dark, and tripped over something, I leaned down to pick it up, and saw that it was my own head. Humans as an individual in this dark void of space are a mere line, a line without a beginning and no sight of an end, but when bent in two with its head connected to its tail, it would feel like a moment of seeing one’s own image in a mirror, surpassing beyond the shattered self and reaching a world that is new and whole. Another one of my art-pieces in this exhibition which had also come from my dreamscape is a small red high-heel shoe made of wrinkled paper, it seems slightly erotic and frightening, it seems like a prop in a movie and is directly related to the dream, on the shoe there writes;I dreamed of going to school as a child, the child next to me was very late for school, I asked her why she was late, she told me; ‘last night, you chopped me into many small pieces, this morning, I spent so long putting myself back together again.’ I am not focused on the human body nor dreams, but rather the paradoxical structure in which they exist that cant be either realistic nor unrealistic once this consciousness is stimulated.
Using teeth to bite –out the shape of a man in gold is way to express forbearance at a religious level and human temperature as well as their marks, also the surpassing of man’s own self to realize the two-way struggles and resistance by the soul.
There is a photographic work showing the views outside of a window on the wall of the exhibition room on the 2nd floor, there is a man standing afar in the picture, any time during the exhibition, if you look at that art-piece, the man would always be standing there. Zeno’s paradoxes revealed the ridicules of the method of bisection, time is indivisible and continuous. If time was like calculus, it would mean there is no stillness in space, but any time during the exhibition, the guy would be standing there, it is also wearing down time and space, carrying with it a true sense of emptiness, the man’s very existence is a disproof of the city’s dreariness.
This piece exudes a chilling violence coming from within the depth of humanity and the original sin of man’s body. The compiled layering structure that it presents as well as the ever-backward logics, and the parallel universes together with the fantastic circulation all exhibits elegant, and rational aesthetics, as well as a testification of feelings and experiences using rationality and logic, surpassing reality and arriving at a new reality.

J: The notion of distance is important in your work … stage scenes… ?

W: The spatial distance in my works are exchanged by time. I like the vectorial feeling of time, it is like standing at any one point on a time-line with everything close seeming small and everything big seeming large. ‘Top of Dopamine’ was an expression of a great distance, ‘Revenge of the Arrow of Time II’ was an expression of a permanent distance at the cliff of time, solo exhibition ‘Lineal Space’ exhibited the distance and relationship between the internal structuring of each artwork. ’Unity with the Divine, Sharing in his Purity and Immortality’ was a exchange of these distances into a more essential data, the cube made of gold had a ratio of 1 :0.618 between it length and width, as well as between its width and hight, the surface was treated with blue varnishing, it is not a product of conventional standards, but rather a product of utopia.
Presently, I have only one art piece which is related to the theatrical scenes ‘All The Flesh Are With Remorse’, it forms a feeling of drifting of the heart and being spun backwards. There is no time, no beginning nor end. The theater-like construction of a bridge under-path, together with the noises of cars passing by
creates a trance-like feeling and a sensation of distance. Like a dejavu, or something from the past-life. It will be a time when our imagination is no longer a metaphor, the reality had become a rhetoric. Stuck between the flow of traffic, this sadness is a sadness of the entire city.

J: Moreover the idea of journey such as driving through a city , taking the train like in A scare ver lasting journey?

W: As a continuation from the above question, traveling is a method of dealing with distance, it is also placed within the context of the city. I had never thought about it in this regard, they were mere sensations I gathered en-route my travels and created the artworks by chance. I feel that when we are not looking at photos, we are observing the city through fragments of view, I use this method of viewing in Shanghai as I drive through the city and paint the city-scape in my mind, and this method of practice as well as it’s psychological fears that it brings, makes it impossible for me to focus on the visual effect of the painting which in turn makes my depiction of the city contorted, even wrinkled and damaged, just like the effects of the city on people contorted and twisted. Same with ‘Non Existing Truth’, I applied me leaving the location of the performance as a beginning, I applied my spending the night away in Shanghai as the main-body of the work, together with the cities allures on me, as well as my imagination for it. At first glance,’The Wrong Body No.1’is a sculpture madly flying around, twisting and turning, fully self-indulgent, with a splash of Rococo, it happened when I was young and was traveling on a train, I was unable to resist the temptation of the girl who slept across from me, I touched her breast. The carriage had the lights turned off and was dark, during the exhibition, I sealed off my eyes with mud and created her one breast from memory, she refused to let me touch her other breast and said that the other one was reserved for her husband, so, the sculpture only had one breast.

J: What do you mean by Non existing truth ? Do you think it is something from your generation?

W: It acts mainly as the name for the artwork.

J: ‘Wound’, do you refer of the fast development of economy and wealth in China ?

W: They are a social-psychological metaphor of the deeper and more intricate that exist beneath the surface, this incompatibility and uncomfortablenesses is caused by the fracturing and re-joining between the different social classes, such wealth is fragile and false and it makes people feel its cruelty and disappointment. It was created after I was invited to stay at a vineyard, as a charming lady (Qianqian) poured me a glass of champagne in the brightly-lit dinning hall of the vineyard, I felt as though the champagne glass shattered in my hands, so I broke the champagne glass and brought the broken pieces to a jewellery shop where they cut them into diamonds and were exhibited together with actual broken glass.

J: Most of your titles are like statements or rings like titles of songs , why this importance ?

W: The context dictates the meaning, whenever I name artworks in such ways, it results in a relationship that are both detached and adjoined. I think that sometimes, names are a explanation of the artworks which gives them a symmetrical comparison, sometimes they are an extension of the content of the artwork, and sometimes they need to be separated from the artwork completely.

J: What is your relation to scale ? intertememited dimension a piece that can take any dimension ?

W: the work dictates its own size.

J: How do you see the future of your work ?

W: The future can never be reached nor can it be imagined, for example ‘2008 Goldman Sachs Project’ where I denied the living the final value of the stocks through my will (dying words), putting capitalism at a more panoramic crisis and state of unknown, I will incorporate lead plates to make a custom-designed production method to deliver the exhibition, hoping it will surpass in volume specific art and creation, and to allow it to receive the unknown in the future-tense as well as a stable nature in the ever progression.
At the same time, I think the past dictates the future. Although we can only experience the present, but we can still look into the future from the present and not just passively sway in the breeze of time. In ’Uncertain Capital’, when I envisioned the piece in 2009, I immediately know of its commercial potential (this piece uses commercial planning and evaluation as its basis of creation, therefore, its commercial value dictates its future), although not many collectors were interested in it at the beginning, some collectors still expressed interest to it but considered it too expensive and gave up the idea of purchasing them, in the end, I stood by outside of time and watched it slip through their fingers and was able to foresee their disappointment today, the price had gone up since and they really can not afford it any more. While the art-piece was at a time of favorable conditions, I was planning to incorporate another commercial strategy, similar to the concept of financial derivatives into it and anticipated to experiment with something new, the experiment consisted of enlarging the amount of coins casted (Edition 13) and create them ahead of time, presenting a more substantial expansion effect and overdraw from a wider expansion potential. The tenth edition will be sold with this edition simultaneously, it was a stimulation for a more effective and more orderly development of the artworks. At the same time, the internal structure are more complex, multiple-elemental, rigid and intricate.

This artwork is to be unceasingly circulated, the result can only be left with the future, in the foreseeable future, it can reach a value of ten million RMB, when casted, it will weigh more than 60 tons, it will be a cube of three meter by 3 meter. But it is still not the end.