FREE PRISM Video Wave

The fall group exhibition “FREE PRISM Video Wave” at OCT Box Art Museum is curated by Dai Zhuoqun. “FREE PRISM Video Wave” takes an overview of the iterative changes in Chinese video art over the past 30 years, from the 1980s, when ideological enlightenment was lifted, to today’s globalized and consumerist network era, inviting seventeen influential and representative artists who have been active in the field of video creation during different periods of time, in an attempt to cross a longitudinal time axis, emphasizing the creation of outstanding individuals. Inviting seventeen influential and representative artists active in the field of video creation in different periods, the exhibition attempts to cross the longitudinal time axis, emphasizing on the examination of outstanding individual creations, not only retracing the rich folds and facets of history, but also presenting the conceptual refreshes and agitations brought about by the current social and technological processes.
Wang Jianwei’s video work Three Forks (2007) is included in this exhibition. The curator’s article “FREE PRISM Video Wave” reads: “As a former winner of the Gold Medal at the National Art Exhibition, Wang Jianwei’s video creation came relatively late, in the 1990s he gave up easel painting and experimented with installations, at one point completing the famous field art project Cycle-Cultivation, and in 2000 he began to use ‘theater’ for the first time in his work with ‘Screen’. ‘Theater’ as a virtual space, into the field of video creation, followed by a series of creations such as ‘Three Forks’, ‘Ceremony’, ‘Production’, ‘Signs’, ‘Yellow Light’, etc., all of which delved into and developed a kind of multi-media theater emphasizing ‘rehearsal’. The most central thing about theater, according to Wang, is rehearsal. Repeated rehearsal means ‘AGAIN’, and the core meaning is that past rehearsals cannot be retraced, while rehearsal means, at the same time, that it has not yet been officially opened, and so the future is not there. ‘Rehearsal’ becomes an open-ended structure, an infinite response to ‘potential’.”