At the end of the live broadcast, Wang Mai recalled that in 2001, when he was invited by curator Shu Yangzhi to attend the performance art festival in Xi'an, the organizers arranged for everyone to visit the Terracotta Warriors, and he said: "I have seen it on TV, so I will not go." "The next day he went to the Forest of Steles.
Artist Wang Mai topped the Xiaohongshu list with 346,000 simultaneous online users on the actionmedia platform on April 26. In an hour-long live broadcast, Wang Mai used his own works to tell his creative experience and view of the art museum, interspersed with a girl's question in Shandong dialect, and the unexpected sound effect re-aroused the audience's interest after the artist's half-hour monologue. How does a painting artist face the camera? Wang Mai's live broadcast "Yunguan Painting Mountain" is an interesting exploration.
Cloud View Painting Mountain
The plague is more than two years old, and many are uncertain.
Ignorance and restriction of flow become uncertain.
The public is scattered into an island, and the isolated continent is connected in the void. Created in three years, the trial fake text is used to move the new body.
For a hundred years, the shape of the long-term vision has been pumped, and the clouds of the New Age have been abandoned. If Wang Jun paints "Barbarism": unobtainable and poor. The intention is to see the plot, but also to create its beginning. I don't know for whom? Please look at the "Painting Mountain".
Curator: AI
The Internet expands infinitely, forming a cloud of data. This is the same as the user experience of living in the cloud, where endless information spreads and reaches every mobile phone screen while also building a semantically complex knowledge system. Wang Mai's online exhibition uses AI writing to generate a curator's preface, "Three Years of Mai Calendar" makes people can't help but be funny, and the conclusion "Please see the painting mountain" is appropriate to clarify the theme.
The large paragraphs of text generated by AI grabbing online keywords cannot be connected to the narrative of idiom meaning, and the prompt of "entertainment only" and the intertextuality of "isolation, decency, and dignity" pull into a huge tension of the times. It is difficult to imagine that AI algorithms can accurately convey Wang Mai's slightly ridiculous tone, and I believe that it is certainly not that Wang Mai has superb artificial intelligence technology, but that AI is so intelligent today and speculates on the characteristics of the characters themselves through the seeds given by people.
Swan Cream NO.1 2019-2021, Cloth Mixed Medium, 238x323cm
Good Goose No.11 2021-2022, oil on canvas, 60x80cm
Wang Mai was an early participant in Chinese contemporary art during the Yuanmingyuan period, and his creations focus on the world pattern while also expressing nostalgia, from global warming to the current live broadcast of Internet celebrities. Having experienced the original and dynamic era of Chinese contemporary art, he has a simple discourse system compared with today's artists who come from the class. Wang Mai in the live broadcast looks back on his creative career with a heavy heart, and at the same time, he does not lack the same black humor as usual in his daily life, breaking through to the top of the list among the handsome men and women of the Little Red Book.
Painting Mountain No.3 2022, oil on canvas, 60x80cm
Fake fiction to move the new body
The sentence "False texts move new forms" in the preface describes the artist's situation in the new media environment. Since the 1970s, "new media art" has opened up new dimensions of technology, and in the following years, the development of media technology has continued to break records, and this efficiency is still rapidly updated today. The rise of short video platforms under 5G network speed and the wave of blockchain NFTs have a self-evident impact on art, and online live broadcasting has entered the artist's studio today.
Cultural Eagle Bear NO.2 2021-2022, oil on canvas, 130x98cm
It has to be said that the development of technology is forcing artists to make changes, whether it is the subject matter or the form. The picture of Wang Mai's work "Live Broadcast" is a few unclear-looking people doing nothing in a room with a confused time and space, the picture of blurred consciousness is like the mental state of isolated life, the live light behind the back, a circular halo is just placed behind the middle character, and the artificial light of the altarpiece style reflects the dilapidation of the fashion items on the body. The isolated life of day and night, or even without expectation, fades the pursuit of glitz in the past, and returns to the basics as rice and flour grain and oil to maintain basic life.
The misalignment of production relations and productive forces has shown great power. Similarly, when the artist has to face the impact of technology, facing the camera, what do we have to do? This undoubtedly poses a huge challenge for the vast majority of practitioners.
Live No.1 2022, oil on canvas, 98x130cm
I watched it on TV and didn't go
With the development of the Internet in the past 20 years of the new century, the explosion of image and video information in the context of UGC (user-uploaded content), network users can see almost any keyword pointing to visual data. If Wang Mai was in Xi'an when he was limited by the result of choosing one or the other, for today's Internet users, searching on the Internet is a simple and efficient operation, and even before going to the theater, you must see the trailer.
The impact of the media on the art scene is fundamental. Obviously, the scene is separated from the display, or the scene is compressed in the two-dimensional space of the screen, there is no way to present the material characteristics of the work, let alone feel the temperature and texture of the material through touch. Susan Sontag wrote in Against Interpretation, "We need an art of pornography. "The limited information provided by the video footage and the artist's work compresses the material experience and leaves the most superficial visual elements. The narrative of the image also becomes the most central element in this situation where sensory information is missing.
Spring Girl NO.1 2021-2022, oil on canvas, 60x80cm
In the trailer of the live broadcast, singer Li Jian recommended it. The two met in 1996, and Li Jian's 2015 self-titled album Li Jian used a portrait of Wang Mai as a record cover. In the live broadcast, Wang Mai introduced the origin of this work, the encounter of the barbecue stall, the suit of Li Fitness in order to find a job, and the success of witnessing his old friend in the past twenty years, and the synchronization of sound and picture at the live broadcast site can even attract the attention of the audience more than the works presented in the exhibition hall alone. At the same time, in the open crowd preset by the live broadcast (relatively professional audiences in galleries and art museums), the introduction and dialogue away from the discourse of the academy also bring the audience closer. This will necessarily involve the artist's creation to some extent.
In the live broadcast, Wang Mai not only once talked about the relationship between technology and creators. "AI can do it very well, but it can only do the level of a second-rate artist, and it can't surpass the real creator." Wang Mai's optimism about technology surpasses many technology practitioners. What technology can do may not be the second rate of people, but open up a new creative logic. Let's look forward to the day when the development of technology can replace the real scene, "After watching the video, you don't have to go to the scene." "Will this be the theme of Wang Mai's next live broadcast?"