Wang Qingsong : A Life
Jeremie Thircuir
Wang Qingsong’s fate has been linked to that of his homeland. He has conceived his work as a reaction to the changes China has undergone during the past thirty years.
Wang Qingsong was born in North-Eastern China in 1966, the same year the Cultural Revolution began. As a child, he moved with his parents to Hubei province, in Central China, where his father found a job in the oil fields. When he was only thirteen years old, his father died, leaving him no choice but to take over his father’s job in order to support his family. That is what he did for the following eight years.
Wang Qingsong always felt that he was different. He rarely spoke, and others found him strange. Deep inside, he always nourished the idea of becoming an artist. In spite of his job, every year he tried without success to pass the entrance exams to China’s fine arts academies. Finally, on his fifth attempt, he managed to get accepted into the prestigious painting department of Sichuan’s Fine Arts Academy.
In 1993, a year after Deng Xiaoping had made his speech advocating the speeding up of China’s economy, he received his painter’s diploma. He then decided to go to Beijing, the capital at the center of the country’s artistic renewal. There he discovered a city in full transformation, opening up to a market economy and abandoning itself to frantic consumption. Western symbols were changing the landscape: drinking Coca Cola and eating at McDonald’s was the latest trend. Colourful new fashions were replacing the drab uniforms of old. The Maoist and Confucian values on which he was raised gradually disappeared and were replaced with the irresistible lust for pleasure and personal enrichment that was shared by all.
Wang Qingsong was poor. The little savings he had on his arrival were soon gone. He lived in artists’ villages on the outskirts of the city, but urban growth, demolitions and increases in rent kept forcing him to move further and further away. He was excluded from this mad race for wealth and pleasure, which he did not understand yet was nevertheless fascinated by.
Faced with the excessive speed of this evolution he questioned the relevance of his medium. Wang decided to give up painting – portraits of men whose faces are enclosed in plastic bags – for photography, the medium he felt was best suited to capture this emerging society. He then began to tell the stories of this new China, the camera replacing his brushes and bodies taking the place of color swatches, but with his training as a painter ever present in his work through his sense of composition.
Wang Qingsong observed these movements, from poverty to wealth, from destitution to abundance, from communism to capitalism. He would make it the central subject of his early works such as Can I cooperate with you? and Finding fun. His work is a reaction to the life he lives and the things he sees. At its heart is the expression of his inability to comprehend the world standing before him. Wang Qingsong thus creates a diary of contemporary China.
Henceforth we see the duality of his position: he is both an actor and a spectator of these transformations, an active witness of history being written before his very eyes. Wang Qingsong stages himself just as he stages society; as a professor in Preschool, as a homeless man in Tramp, or as the host in China Mansion. He recomposes his role throughout his photographs.
His beginnings as a photographer tie him to the Gaudi Art movement, initiated by the critic Li Xianting, whom we can see as the central figure in Night revels of Lao Li. This movement, born in the Songzhuang artists’ village, thirty kilometres to the east of Beijing, brought together many artists producing kitsch, colourful works that explore the confusion and contradictions of a country that is overwhelmed by the ongoing economic reforms.
Under the influence of this movement, Wang Qingsong’s vocabulary falls into place. He has created an iconography integrating humor and derision with Western and Chinese symbolism. One discovers wry winks at Ingres, Manet, Botticelli in works such as China Mansion or Romantique. These references to art history are devoid of their original meaning and context. They are diverted, distorted and superimposed to denounce the way in which culture has become a mere commodity. Mimicking this perception, the beauty of the original works becomes a confused, clumsy and vulgar caricature.
Wang Qingsong uses these elements as the words of the visual story that will make up the image. As in Chinese poetry, where the beauty of a character is expressed as much by its meaning as by the calligraphy with which it is written, Wang Qingsong plays with symbols to give substance to his photographs. He assembles, recomposes and often incongruously draws together ideas in order to better represent the motion of society and the world.
He is also influenced by traditional Chinese icono-graphy, which he uses and updates in his images. Although his ideas go beyond it, Chinese reality serves as a starting point for his work. In order to place his images in this setting and insert his visual grammar within it, he draws inspiration from the classics of Chinese painting, which he then appropriates. He revisits a work by Han Xizai in Night revels of Lao Li and Song Dynasty paintings in Bathouse and Knickknack Peddler.
He uses these traditional forms as a framework, employing large formats, which remind us of scrolls where storytelling follows the time and the movement of the eye. The picture becomes a lively little theatre that gives the viewer enough time to see the many facets of a complex reality unfolding before him. This could not be achieved in a single instant shot.
As one can see, Wang Qingsong’s work incorporates a deep reflection on the nature of the image and its semantic mechanisms. This reflection too is inspeparable from his experience.
Wang Qingsong grew up surrounded by revolutionary imagery which left a deep mark on his childhood and later influenced him in his creations. He draws on these manipulated and reconstructed icons that are used as a medium for propaganda: images illustrating slogans that tell the masses of a glorious, productive and united China; images of the famed soldier Lei Feng and the workers or farmers that recur as defining symbols of a popular iconography that everyone can rally around and relate to. However, as illustrated in his triptych Past, Present and Future, he realizes that aesthetics are not inherently linked to the ideology they are meant to embody. The idea is not dependent on the form of the representation.
Having understood the power of propaganda and revolutionary imagery, Wang Qingsong implements their tactics. Freed of their dogmatic discourse, he plays with these familiar forms to serve his message and its dissemination. He erases what is superfluous, simplifying the message to make it accessible to the masses. It is art for the people. This apparent simplicity of the image, and more importantly its efficiency, is what gives Wang Qingsong’s works their personality.
Unlike their counterparts in the past, his works seek to understand the nature of events without imposing an ideology. They are built to create a discourse, a friction between time and civilizations. Traditional China, modern China and the globalized West oppose and confront each other to create a new cultural territory.
When he wakes up in the morning, Wang Qingsong turns on his television. He watches the news. The false objectivity of this constant stream of images leaves him deeply perplexed. He sees only fragmentary visions of a reality that is far more complex. This is the reason he ironically defines his art as a sort of journalism. Paradoxically, it is by constructing and manipulating the image that he will humourously bring out the truth of a situation.
Since the turn of this century, the situation in China has changed dramatically. The feeling that “everything is new, everything is possible”, of this new openness, has become the norm. Since 2001, China has been gaining confidence: it has joined the WTO and Beijing was chosen to host the Olympic Games. Foreigners have begun to flow into the country, thus accelerating its internationalization. Chinese artists, of whom Wang Qingsong is one of the most famous, travel around the world for their exhibitions. Collectors fight over their works. For Wang Qingsong, it is like stepping through the looking glass: he is reaping the benefits of economic growth, breaking records at auctions and has become one of the most expensive photographers in the world.
In his work, the pinnacle of kitsch and the critique of consumerism have given way to an expression of social issues. In Offerings and Temple, he criticizes the commodification of religion and the loss of spirituality. In Competition, he denounces the invasion of public space by brand names. In Dormitory, he exposes the plight of migrant workers. Tackling problems as diverse as education, ecology, and the culture crisis, Wang Qingsong is an artist whose deep political engagement is firmly grounded in the reality of the world he is a part of.
By producing increasingly spectacular photographs, he reminds us that nothing is impossible in this new China, where means and ambitions are equal. The commercial success enjoyed by these artists nourishes their work and pushes the limits of what they can create to heights that are unimaginable to many Western artists.
Fueled by his desire for the huge and the spectacular, Wang Qingsong’s photographs are sometimes limited only by technology, as is the case with The History of Monuments, whose 42-metre-width is the maximum length of a roll of photographic paper. His stagings often require months of preparation and hundreds, even thousands of extras.
Wang Qingsong still retains his artistic lexicon but he is enlarging it. His images have become deeper. To the kitsch of Gilbert & George or David Lachapelle, which marked his earlier works, he has added the excess of Andreas Gursky, the cinematographic staging of Gregory Crewdson, the symbolic juggling of Jeff Wall, and the masses of bodies of Spencer Tunick.
The borders between East and West seem to have disappeared. Present and history are now one. The timelessness of his work and his conception of humanity and its nature, make Wang Qingsong a leading artist of our era.
By observing society’s movements, he detects humanity’s madness. Despite its colour and the humour that stands out from it, Wang Qingsong’s work is fundamentally bleak. Parody and mockery become the only tolerable means to describe his pessimism with regard to the dramatic mechanism of human history.
