On March 26th, the exhibition "Cultural Symbols - The Journey of Wang Youshen" was opened at the Middle Art Museum, curated by Lu Yinghua, through the two angles of "from meaningless to meaningless" and "from image processing to image disappearance", which comprehensively sorted out and presented the artistic experiment and practice of contemporary artist Wang Youshen spanning more than 30 years for the first time.
From de-meaning to meaningless
The section "From De-Meaning to Meaningless" covers nearly 20 groups of Works by Wang Youshen from the late 1980s to 2017, most of which are original works and also a small part of the literature.
Wang Youshen graduated from the Central Academy of Fine Arts in 1988 with a major in comic strips and subsequently worked for Beijing Youth Daily. His art closely follows the process of Chinese contemporary art since the mid-to-late 1980s and has developed its own unique form. At the beginning of his career, Wang Youshen witnessed extensive discussions in the art world about pop aesthetics and symbolic concepts. In the midst of this aftermath, Wang Youshen adopted collage and repetition techniques to create a series of portrait works with symbolic features.
After entering the 1990s, On the one hand, Chinese art has taken media renewal as a feature of art contemporaneity and globalization, on the other hand, it has pulled the perspective of examining society and life back to the surrounding and individual, and deliberately distanced itself from the thinking of the 1980s, which had a strong metaphysical significance. Wang Youshen was also a member and promoter of the "new generation" group in Beijing at that time.
Portrait Series, Diary, 1990, Comprehensive Materials on Paper, Album, 806×34 cm
The Portrait Series Diary, on display, is a collage of thirteen silhouette silhouettes of portraits framed in traditional Chinese albums. These include a variety of media, including newspapers, newsletters, journals written on paper, and red annotations. In the eighth image of this work, the silhouette is a combination of handwritten edits of the "Preview of major TV shows of the week", red annotations, illustrations of costumed characters, and magazine briefings in foreign languages. On the right side of the album is a "Excerpt from the Newspaper" briefing on the "Tv show on Saturday, April 14 and TV on Sunday, April 15" on the right side of the album. Wang Youshen's works focus on the mechanism of cultural information generation, the relationship between individuals in society and mainstream thought. The work focuses on more personal written materials, diaries, and the recording of the mainstream media "Central Radio" television program in the daily editing work of child labor, suggesting the universal intervention and influence of the media on life.
Mass media, mass culture and print culture were cultural issues of considerable interest in the 1990s. Under the opportunity of further marketization, the mass media has gained a greater degree of freedom and occupied a larger space for social discourse. Under the focus of the media, many social phenomena have been reported and discussed, gaining cultural significance. Because of the opportunity of personal work, Wang Youshen obtained a more relaxed and active practice platform at this time. He not only brought the coverage of contemporary art and the conceptual practice of contemporary artists into the section of Beijing Youth Daily, but also made it gain more social attention. He also constantly depicts the relationship between the media industry and social life and landscape, using Beijing Youth Daily as an example. "Beijing Youth Daily" has thus become a platform for his work and creation, and has also become a first-hand material for his creation.
Newspapers, Newspapers, 1993, Acts, Photographs, 185× 127 cm, 70× 48 cm
In the Newspapers & Newspapers series, Wang youshen turns newspapers—a medium for conveying information—into everyday objects, such as clothes made from newspapers and rooms covered with newspapers. Sheng Wei, a researcher in art history, believes that the Newspaper Series has turned the newspaper into a "social symbol and cultural landscape", so that it no longer needs to be read verbatim, but has become a "visual object to be viewed". By breaking down the boundaries between newspapers and everyday objects, Wang You's symbolic behavior conveys a reflection on the concept of mass media.
Newspapers and Advertisements, 1993, Screen Printing, Photographs, 2.50×1.85 m
In 1993, Wang Youshen brought the Newspaper Series into the newspaper industry. On the front page of the Press and Publications, published on March 20, 1993, Wang Youshen used the newspaper-strewn Great Wall as the advertising theme for the 44th anniversary of the founding of Beijing Youth Daily, which read: "Here, through the next century... Celebrating the 44th anniversary of the founding of Beijing Youth Daily". Under the background of the vertical column entitled "Forty-four Years of Hard Work, Three Newspapers and One Issue, Young and Promising", Wang Youshen's image of the Great Wall is successfully embedded in this context. By experimenting with the possibility of pictures expressing different meanings in different contexts, Wang Youshen deeply discovered the highly malleable characteristics of newspapers as a communication medium.
From image processing to image disappearance
From "Image Processing to Image Disappearance", the unit outlines another clue in Wang Youshen's creative techniques since the 1990s through nearly 10 groups of works.
Since 1987, the publication of art has returned from the form of group-style manifestos in the mid-1980s to the individual expression of the artist. The tendency to express oneself and be close is embodied in Wang You's body as a series of works that gaze at one's friends and family. "Cleaning My Friend" is the first work in the "Cleaning" series, showing the artist's reflections on personal memories – replaying fragments of intimate life, using cleaning in the darkroom as an objective way to wash and filter these private memories.
"Cleaning" is a special method for Wang You's body to deal with visual media, deconstructing the photo again in the darkroom or washing it with clean water, exposing the contradiction of the image medium in its "cleaning" process, that is, the image can not only preserve the memory, but also select and erase the memory.
Darkroom Cleaning, 1998-2022, Darkroom Equipment, Negatives, Photo Paper, Developer Tray, Water, Red Light, Line, Clip, Document, Variable Size
The concept of "darkroom" is a concept that developed, extracted and evolved from the technical system of photography itself. From 1998 to 2004, Wang Youshen performed his "darkroom" works in delicate, Pittsburgh, Taipei, Guangzhou and Shanghai exhibitions. The idea of the "purge" project first appeared in 1995, expanded again after 2000, and eventually appeared with the "darkroom".
In the concept of "Darkroom Cleaning", the production, transmission, consumption and feedback of information are gathered in the same space, becoming a scene of uncertain experience. The washing of photos in clean water realizes the conversion of the contents of the photos between the existence and the absence, suggesting the cyclical process of "constantly being made and forgotten" of images and information.
Showroom scene
Since the 1990s, Wang Youshen's creative career has coincided with the further globalization of Chinese art at this time, and he has exhibited many works in Western Europe, North America and South America. Although he has participated in most of the group exhibitions focusing on China, because he is based on specific topics and personal experiences, his creations are different from some superficial symbols that were repeatedly solidified by the post-Cold War ideological projection in the early 1990s, and are therefore not easily recognized and consumed by the art market and mass communication. For the cognition and writing of the history of Chinese contemporary art, Wang Youshen's case has become the object of more attention of serious art historians and institutions because it closely follows the context of the times and tenaciously grows a flexible and full form.
It is reported that since the "Disordered Harmony" exhibition in 2017, the Middle Art Museum has opened up the combing and research of the 1990s through the investigation of some specific areas and cases. This case study of Wang Youshen is also a part of this research sequence.
Nandu reporter Huang Qian