Whom to Follow 《跟谁学》, March 8, 2025
2025In March 2025, Wang Qingsong mounted “Whom to Follow” (《跟谁学》), a large-scale solo exhibition that pulled back the curtain on the everyday theatre of contemporary Chinese society. Across nearly fifty staged photographs and video works, the artist re-staged the rituals of work, learning, leisure and public assembly that the surrounding decades of modernization have produced.
Taken together, the photographs in the show form a single, exasperated self-portrait of the country that produced them. Wood and steel classrooms stand in for years of after-school drill; an entire field of easels becomes the stage for a national festival of memory; a Han-Xizai-style banquet reopens, in front of a green screen, as the long television evening that the nation has chosen to watch.
The contact sheet below collects six photographs from the opening day: rows of easels across the field, the panel discussion, a single painting of Night Revels of Lao Li, and the opening title card.
The second contact sheet captures twenty-two frames sampled from the exhibition walkthrough video, documenting the installed works in the gallery space.
Awaiting individual full-resolution images of each panel of the contact sheet. When those arrive from the shared Drive folder, this overview page will be expanded with separate image blocks for each on-site shot, replacing the contact-sheet thumbnail.