Huang Zhuan:

You have always been an artist who is admittedly impossible to define and categorize. I have found a neutral word in the vocabulary of your work: “theater”. In my opinion, this concept has two meanings in your works: one is a material meaning, the “theater” since ancient Greece is composed of three parts: the stage, the backstage, and the audience, which is a physical structure; the other is a metaphorical meaning, a physical structure that many of your works also present. Since ancient Greece, “theater” is composed of three parts: stage, backstage and auditorium, which is a kind of physical structure, and many of your works also present such a physical structure; the other is a metaphorical meaning, which is the discourse structure composed by the stage. I think you can first talk about the meaning of “theater” in the discourse of your work.

Jianwei Wang:

In fact, I didn’t have a particularly strong concept of “theater” in my mind at the beginning, and in 2000 I made “Screen”, which was technically my first experimental process of “theater”, but at that time, “theater” was not the only thing that I had in mind, and it was a very important part of my work. But at that time, the concept of “theater” was not yet complete. I got two revelations from the ancient Greek theater, one is the difference between it and Shakespeare’s plays. The ancient Greek theater should not be regarded as a kind of “performance” nowadays, but actually has something to do with the public and politics. The Greek theater was not about presenting a produced play to an audience, it was actually a place where, through debate, the public voted for the knowledge that they thought best represented human values. When we were in beauty school, we read Agamemnon by the ancient Greek tragedy writer Aeschylus, which I didn’t understand at the time, but only later did I come to understand its meaning, which represented two meanings, one of the need to maintain social justice and order, and the other posing the question of whether or not human beings have a moral ground to stand on in the maintenance of social justice? These two contradictory things are presented at the same time. In addition, in terms of spatial structure, the stage in ancient Greece was completely different from that in China, where the audience was on top and the actors were on the bottom, in the shape of a fan, while the stage of the Chinese theater was higher than that of the audience, so the relationship between the theater and the audience was completely different. The relationship between the theater and the audience is completely different. At that time, the concept of the “fourth wall” was also established, which refers to the space facing the audience. This is what laid the foundation for all our traditional theater spaces. Another revelation is that the ancient Greek theater was not the same as the Chinese audience, and I felt this difference when I made Production in 1996. Chinese audiences were in a very secular state when they watched theater, for example, they were high on melon seeds, talking loudly, etc. There was no sense of ritual. Later on, I felt that the real significance of “theater” is that it is a site of transformation and meaning-making, just as in De Beau’s The Landscape Society, where he revised the Marxist view of capitalist society from a society of material commodities to a society of landscape-making, which is similar to Baudrillard’s view of images and the world. Baudrillard’s theories about images and the world. I think it is in this context that I gradually developed my point of view on the concept of “theater”. Returning to “theater”, I would like to present “Signs” at OCAT this time, which is a very crucial turning point in my creation. Theater, drama, space, film and history used to be arranged in a linear structure, but in this work, I want to completely lose the boundaries between them.

I think that Althusser’s analysis of ideology is actually in line with Debord’s “landscape society”. Althusser studies the state apparatus and material practices of ideology, while Debord explains that the materialized system produces a certain kind of landscape substitution, and in fact, we have to go back to the relationship between image-making and ideology. In fact, we have to go back to the relationship between image-making and ideology, and I think that one of the central things about ideological culture is that it allows the real and imagined environments of individual existence to be replaced with each other, and transformed into a manifestation of an imaginative relationship. For me, this knowledge is also constantly evolving and, moreover, is not produced according to a certain right time and logic. For example, how is the system of fantastical sexuality established? How does it relate to ideology and religion? –from Feuerbach’s critique of Christian theology, which argued that religion was using the illusion of God as a substitute for reality itself, to Marx’s argument that the mutual contradictions and self-splitting of the secular foundations themselves were equally important foundations for the dual association of religion and ideology. In this way it is easy to understand why ideology is used as an illusionary belief system that contradicts real and scientific knowledge, and through those processes of practice that construct and relate people to that system. Initially when I made Production, I began to notice a site of association, such as how is the site of discourse established and how does it unfold in conversation and place? Later on, I gradually realized how to create a landscape in the “theater”. How to transform? The concept of overlapping space was gradually formed. In this way, there is a connection between the audience and the landscape, between the visible and the invisible, and this is the beginning of my concept of “theater”.

Huang Zhuan:

Foucault had a concept called “archaeology of knowledge”, and I think maybe we can discuss your work in this way. Let’s put aside the question of the meaning or correctness of your artworks, and instead find the intellectual mechanisms and conditions that have shaped your way of working from the source. If the history of your work starts from 1992’s Document – Event, then it is the source of our intellectual archaeology, let’s see if we can find some logic in this clue. 1993 you created Cycle – Planting, I remember that I did an “Installation Review” for this work in The Gallery at that time, and the earliest criticisms I made about your work came from that time. My earliest criticisms of your work began at that time. I think at that time your works were still exploring issues of general intellectualism and knowledge structure. After 1996, with “Production” and “Life Elsewhere”, the issues explored extended to the politics of space, historical attributes and ideological relations, and you began to have doubts about writing history and began to examine a history formed in ideology, but the interest in this examination did not seem to be aimed at investigating the authenticity of the history or the essential meaning of the history, but rather the intellectual conditions of the history’s formation. However, it seems that the interest in this kind of investigation does not aim to investigate the authenticity of history or the essential meaning of history, but lies in the conditions of knowledge in the formation of history, which is completely different from the confrontational attitude of Chinese artists towards ideology at that time.

 

Beginning with The Screen in 2000, your work has developed a clear methodology based on several different intellectual constructs, one of which is your understanding of Althusser’s theory of ideology. Althusser’s contribution to the Marxist theory of ideology is that whereas Marxism sees ideology as the result of alienated reactions in alienated environments, Althusser argues that the relationship of ideology, although it is a phantasmagoric belief – a “pseudo-ideology” according to Engels – is based on the belief that the ideology of the world is a “pseudo-ideology”, and that it is a “pseudo-ideology”. while Althusser argues that ideological relations, though an illusory belief – a “pseudo-idea” according to Engels – are based on concrete material practices. Althusser was not interested in such “pseudo-ideas” per se; he thought that even “pseudo-ideas” could have a rigorous logic in themselves, as in the case of theology. What Althusser was interested in was the materialized practice of institutions, of the state apparatus, which is in a sense an unconscious ideology. I can think of an example that just happened. A few days ago, when the Olympic flame was passed in Guangzhou, many of my friends told me that they were asked by their units to meet the flame at a certain designated time and location. Obviously, this was an organized ceremonial activity, but most of the interviewees in the media interviews that we have seen on TV say that it was spontaneous, and this creates a factual contrast – -Which people are telling the truth? In Althusser’s way, truthfulness is not important here; he does not examine which of the two types of people is more truthful, but he examines the dominant conditions behind the two types of statements, if the former is dominated by a specific system of control, such as a “unit” or an “organization”, then the latter may be dominated by a specific system of control, such as a “unit” or an “organization”. If the former is dominated by a specific control system such as “unit” or “organization”, the latter may be controlled and dominated by the “camera”, which is a kind of “unconscious domination”: Chinese people will only say the “right” words when they face the camera of the TV set, which is the subconscious of thought control. This is a subconscious state of thought control. We don’t need to investigate the authenticity of their speech, but we need to reveal what kind of discourse environment makes them form such a habit of speech. Here is where I find Althusser’s profundity.
It is the questioning of a physiological response to an ideology that makes sense of the notion of space that you have just mentioned. “Theater” is a virtual situation in which a real production is accomplished, and if the specific theater space is moved to the living space, then the whole life becomes a theater. The examination of history in many of your works is not archaeology in the true sense of the word. For example, in 2000’s Screen, you interspersed Han Xizai’s Night Banquet with this historical text, and you once said that what you were interested in there was not the reality of history, but its “loopholes”, and that you hoped to use the “theater” as a means of producing reality. You wanted to use the virtual space of “theater” to demonstrate a certain power relationship between the voyeur and the voyeur. I think it is precisely from this work that you have consciously abandoned the ethical judgment of ideology or the judgment of authenticity, and focused on constructing an investigative relationship, which is the foundation of your “theater”, and in fact the “theater” provides a space to continue this relationship. In 2000, Hidden Wall is an extension of this kind of ideological examination of reality. I remember an interview with you about this work, in which you talked about how it was easy to distinguish the political identities of the German audience who sang the Internationale: those who held the song sheet were West Germans, and those who didn’t held the sheet were East Germans. This is how ideological historical memory shapes people: for West Germans, the Internationale is just a classic text from another world; for East Germans, it is part of their lives. I am also particularly interested in the way that your theater provides a virtual ideological scene, making it easier for us to perceive the “gaps” that are usually not so easy to see. Is this “relationship” a method or a value judgment for you in terms of shaping an observational relationship through “theater”?

Also, I’ve been thinking about how to see, and I’ve always thought that the idea of “theater” is really not just about the relationship between the landscape and the audience, but also about transformation and shared space. Why is ancient Greek theater different from Shakespeare’s? It is because it changed the relationship between theater and audience. Ancient Greek plays had an audience voting part, and such behavior was brought into the theater, and the audience’s attitudes and choices added to the concept of theater, which actually changed the only relationship between theater and audience. In De Beauvoir’s book The Landscape Society, he revises the Marxist relationship between the landscape and the public in relation to the relationship between commodity and society, while juxtaposing ideological issues. I think the concept of “theater” should also be put into the context of the relationship between landscape society and the public.

Huang Zhuan:

The concept of “relationship” is very important – there is also a very important concept of “non-place” in your meaning of “theater”. “I think this concept describes the uncertainty of the relationship of “theater”. A theater consists of a backstage, which can be broadly or narrowly defined, including a writer’s, director’s, or dressing room, etc., and is a space of conspiracy or domination, while the stage is a space for the performance of “serious” speech acts, or what Foucault calls a “statement”, a place for the performance of “serious” acts, a place for the performance of “serious” acts, a place for the performance of “serious” acts, a place for the performance of “serious” acts. The stage is a space for the performance of “serious” speech acts, what Foucault calls “statements”, a place for discursive analysis, and the auditorium is a space for viewing and receiving. The classical relation of the theater is that the active is the backstage, the frontstage is the active presentation, and the audience is the passive receiver. The concept of “non-place” subverts these spatial relations and demonstrates the paradoxical reality of the interchangeability and mutual control of these relations. The exhibition you made in Shanghai in 2005, “Between…”, is a very good example of this concept of “non-place”, in which you turned the whole construction site, elevators and some unformed places into exhibition spaces, disrupting the relationship between the active and the passive. In your concept of “theater”, besides this kind of methodological meaning, is there any “anti-control” thinking in it? According to Foucault, the so-called “anti-control” means that our intellectual practice is always controlled by a certain kind of discursive power, a kind of discursive exclusion, restriction and appropriation, and I would like to ask whether your concept of “non-place” also expresses a certain kind of “anti-control”. I would like to ask you, in your concept of “non-place”, does it also show some kind of “anti-control” thinking?

Wang Jianwei:

Before “Screen”, the whole contemporary art has a clear boundary about space, one is the exhibition space and the other is the traditional theater space. Even the shape of the art and the arrangement of the place were very accurate. Before “Screen”, there was no work in Chinese contemporary art that was directly put into the theater space, I think it is not simply moving the position of the work that can be called “theater”, I think that some works are not legal to be put into any space, but rather, the work should have some kind of uniqueness with the scene. First of all, I want to establish the concept of theater, which means to change the discourse and physicality of contemporary art; at the same time, I have to be wary of the fact that it is naturally effective just by resisting a certain discourse system; in addition, how to maintain the duality of space without falling into a progress of just a linear displacement? Therefore, I don’t need to give a “theater” the meaning of “contemporary art” in order for it to have significance, nor do I want to revise any traditional attributes of the theater, and I chose a children’s theater in Beijing (Beijing Seven Colors Theatre) for Screen, which is a simple theater. It is a simple theater in the sense that it has just been built and has not yet been used, and it does not have much cultural added value. The problem I had to solve at that time was not to let it embody too many attributes.

Huang Zhuan:

Once you enter a particular professional program or disciplinary place, you are controlled by the context or order there.

Jianwei Wang:

I don’t know if you still remember, one summer we went to Tokyo, Japan, and we were organized to go to see an art museum, and when we went in, the air conditioning was very comfortable, and there was no work on the wall, but there was a staff member in the corner, and we thought that person was a work, and you said at that time that anything that appeared in this space could be a work. That is to say that this space accomplishes the control of its properties. When I chose the theater, I faced the same problem: how to get rid of one kind of control and at the same time become a product of another kind of control? I was looking for an intermediate relationship. For example, I didn’t choose a large theater, which has a space of 500 square meters and 300 seats, and whose history and mode of production have determined that its space has a clear cultural attribute; for example, when one says small theater, it must be “avant-garde”, which is a complete double misinterpretation.

I chose a children’s theater as the theater for my work, on the other hand, because it doesn’t have many attributes of its own.

Huang Zhuan::

“The avant-garde has now become a professional program that is controlled by its own specific mechanisms. For example, museums and biennials have become the control mechanism of a certain professional order. Is your pursuit of “non-place” also an attempt to carry out some kind of professional “anti-control”?

Wang Jianwei:

If you just go to make an “anti-control” work, you actually become part of this control. This requires vigilance. I refuse to choose a space that has no attributes at all. This space has a basic attribute, it is a traditional theater, it has a public nature, and I don’t modify it in any way, but at that time, it gives me the feeling that it provides a kind of connecting point with the society, and that’s the kind of space I want to choose. Further, I don’t need it to have too many attributes, otherwise it will form a kind of control, which will make people think that what appears in this space must be traditional or contemporary. Also, there is a so-called Western control of non-place, like lofts, factories, streets, etc., which is an anti-museum, anti-institutionalized system. I think for both kinds of control, it’s not that standing on one side constitutes a meaning for the other side.

That’s why I chose a children’s theater, which conforms to the basic concept of theater, in the sense that I don’t have to make any corrections to it; and secondly, it can connect to the public space, where there’s a cognitive experience – the public watches the play here, and they don’t have any preconceptions, they come to see it but they don’t identify with what they’re going to see type of play, I think it is most legitimate to connect the public with this kind of experience.

Huang Zhuan::

You talk about it in an interesting way. Let me briefly describe Foucault’s theory of knowledge, which consists of two structures. One is his description of the genealogy of knowledge, he thinks that the genealogy of human knowledge includes three historical processes: the Renaissance, the classical and the modern, let’s not bother about this; and the other is about the critique of discourse, which is the most profound part of his theory. He thinks that our critique of discourse should not be based on the so-called ethical critique, but on the knowledge and analysis of control conditions. He thinks that there are three kinds of discursive power control that we should oppose, one is “external discursive control”. There are three forms: the first is the imposition of taboos, such as rules about what can and cannot be done; the second is discrimination, such as discrimination against the insane and the insane. The definition of “madness” is ephemeral, with different definitions in different eras, and it is only in modern rational societies that “madness” has become a different kind of person, and a kind of discursive control of such people has been formed; the third is the control of the so-called truthfulness, the exclusionary zone, the distinction between truth and fallacy. The third is the control of the so-called truthfulness, the exclusionary distinction between truth and fallacy, once the formation of a certain “truth”, we tend not to be accustomed to investigate the reasons behind the formation of the truth, “external control” is precisely built on this logic.

The second type of control of discursive power that we should oppose is “internal control”. One of them is the “principle of commentary,” in which we constantly comment on a classic text so that it becomes the dominant narrative and ultimately constitutes the authoritative discourse, as is the case with the classicization of many religions, laws, sciences, and literatures; another is called the “principle of authorship,” in which we will always be able to find the reasoning behind the formation of truths. Another is called the “authorial principle”, in which we always choose a deified author in history and organize his discourse (e.g., attribute to him a masterpiece whose author cannot be determined), thus conferring on him some kind of “authorial discursive power”. There is also the “disciplinary principle”, which tends to exercise its discursive power by means of “truth”, “objectivity” and expertise.

The third kind of discursive power control that we should oppose is the “control of application”, which is divided into four kinds of situations: speech program, discourse association, ideological principle and social appropriation, all of which refer to the professional language, identity, system, ideology, and association mechanism with mutual control, which is constituted by human beings through professional training within a certain professional system, such as the journalism system, the education system, the education system, and so on. The system of journalism, the system of education, and the system of the arts, for example, should also fall into this category.

One of the key concepts I mentioned earlier is “non-place” – I think a lot of your work is about “emptying”, emptying the system of power by constructing a certain kind of hypothetical relationship. A lot of your work either exposes control or embodies counter-control – your counter-control is not strategic, it’s tactical, and there are a lot of details that you use to make holes in the original theater. This is how I understand it, although you have a lot of ideological overtones – in a sense, this is the cultural instinct of a Chinese artist——

–But you don’t want to make an ethical judgment, you are constantly fighting against control, and I even think you are sometimes consciously fighting against your own “avant-garde identity”.

Jianwei Wang:

I think the two points you made are very important. One is about ideology, I am now consciously and gradually trying to replace the collective ideological identity with an ideological knowledge; the other is about control. I think it may have started out as a macro sense of control, where I first questioned the control of knowledge, then moved on to questioning the historical, public control, and then questioned the control of institutions. The word “sign” is a word from medicine, and Althusser sees it as an important concept for the transition from traditional to contemporary literature, where the word and its syntax are no longer intended to construct a cognitive meaning, but to provide a “symptomatic reading”. The “symptomatic reading” is like a doctor’s visit to a patient, where the patient has many signs, such as a stomach ache or a pain in the stomach, but these signs do not point to a single conclusion. I think this is a very brilliant theory, and it is also in line with the method of working in ambiguous terrain. We are not trying to dismiss experience altogether; and at the same time we are not saying that we can make judgments about the world as long as we have experience that is trustworthy enough. Neither is desirable. What is particularly interesting about “signs” is that it has a whole set of experiences and logic in it, but all these experiences and logic do not lead to only one conclusion, so how to reach a judgment in observation?

Huang Zhuan::

How many sets of relationships did you describe in the video work “Signs”?

Wang Jianwei:

Four groups. I went to Berlin, saw the venue twice, and held a seminar on “discourse”. The four sets of relationships are gradually peeled off from them. The “discourse” here is not my discussion of “discourse”, but the Western understanding of China, which I have organized into four sections. The first one is about ancient history, which is the Western imagination of traditional China; the second one is the stage from the overthrow of the emperor to the rule of the Communist Party, which is a period of anarchy and warlordism in the Republic of China; in 1949 there was a big turnaround; and then there is the stage of reform and opening up. At the symposium, it was obvious to me that whether scholars or artists were talking about it, they were all interpreting their own knowledge of these four stages of China to varying degrees, basically not intellectual, but empirical and deductive. In Signs, I have juxtaposed these four relationships in accordance with my methodology, whereby partial correctness cannot be judged together, but is only a context, and in addition, judging the correctness of a part requires a great deal of correlative experience. The “juxtaposition” corresponds to the “presence” of my methodology, but the relationship of the “presence” does not determine the only conclusion, so the whole site maintains a relational site, and at the same time. Therefore, the whole site remains a relational site, and at the same time, the positional and spatial relations between them are constantly changing, so it’s difficult to get some kind of unique and definitive conclusion, and I question this conclusion. I’ve been insisting on being able to keep asking questions and remain capable of asking questions. For our system of knowledge, the exponentially high number of times we stop asking questions, we can stop in front of any question, and there are so many things that we stop pursuing that it creates a world that is completely unquestioned, and I think that’s scary, and that’s a hole in the world when it can be questioned over and over again with other knowledge and experience.

Huang Zhuan::

I think Signs is the most important piece of your work, and it embodies your methodology and anti-control principles in a more complete way. I saw your Hostage in Shanghai, and I also think it’s a very good work, although what it embodies may not be as complex as Signs. The “symptomatic reading” is a way of reading texts created by Althusser. It turns out that when we look at a work, we are looking for what the text reflects and reveals, and the premise of this kind of reading is to affirm that the text is the product of the author’s subjective consciousness, but it happens to forget that all writing is controlled by a particular ideology, and this is the premise of reading, in which we have to pursue not only what the text says, but also why the author says what he says and what he hasn’t said yet. There are a large number of “gaps”, “omission”, “silence” in the text, they are not the need to take the initiative to modify, such as “beyond the words They are not the need for active modification, such as “extra words”, but what the author unconsciously says or is unable to say under the control of ideology, which is the “symptom” that the real criticism should pay attention to, because only it can provide the real knowledge about the ideology. This type of reading is reflected in Hostages. In it you first create a standard set of “workers, peasants, and soldiers,” which symbolize and represent a certain impersonal order and power, and then you construct a group image of class that is one level below this standard, in the general sense that the former represents or identifies the latter. relationship of control and control, or mutual control. You also portray the class enemy, who is in an antagonistic relationship with the workers, peasants and soldiers, but in your work they are also controlled by a relationship of mutual control. This work provides many of the “gaps” that are often overlooked in the history of ideology. The relationships constructed in Signs are more complex, including the presentation of the Western way of looking at China that you have just mentioned.

I think these are the essence of your “theater”, that you counter-control by constructing relationships, that you don’t reveal or reflect anything, but rather create events through “relationships”, and read through events.

Jianwei Wang:

I think “Signs” is a turning point for me. First of all, I had to face the question of how to make a “relational” image. I was so overwhelmed by the filming of Signs that not only was I in a mess, but all the crew were in a mess during the whole preparation and filming process – to make the performances of the four groups of people into a kind of co-temporal performance, and even at that time, the cameramen didn’t know how to find the camera position, the lights didn’t know how to set them up, the actors didn’t know how to step forward, and how to make the film! How do you take a step, how do you shoot something like that? Post-editing was exhausting as well. I got a lot of my technical stuff from making Signs, when I was thinking about how an ephemeral and co-temporal image can be viewed. Signs is an uninterrupted, always-on relationship between four groups of people, and I think my video art has always been practiced before Signs.

Huang Zhuan::

The significance of Signs is multi-faceted. I think the whole field of contemporary art criticism has not yet formed a mechanism for interpreting this kind of work, which is a big problem. If such an interpretation mechanism is established, the whole critical world will also take a big step forward.

Wang Jianwei:

There are two other factors related to “symptomatic reading”: how to maintain a certain kind of incomplete reading? In my works, I want to let a certain part of the symptom kick in and let another part be restricted. This is what I understand when I read Wang Guangyi’s work in reverse, “Why can it only be so simple?” –No one has ever asked this question, but rather we are trying to show that we have the ability to “reflect” the problem, but when we don’t have this ability, I think we will have a new one.

Huang Zhuan::

Contemporary art is also an “entropic” process, when freedom is no longer restricted, its energy is quickly dissipated at an accelerated rate, and it is revealing that the old ways of criticizing are exacerbating this process of depletion.

Let’s turn back to Beuys. I have always felt that the entire history of contemporary art is delimited by Beuys: before him, the “pre-Beuys era”, and after him, the “post-Beuys era”.

Beuys raised a lot of questions, he had a twofold nature, one is that he completely disrupted the original sense of contemporary art’s reflective critique and experimental in the philosophical sense starting from Duchamp, his creative heyday was synchronized with the emergence of Althusser and Foucault’s theories, and his whole life carried out the discourse of the real world’s critique of the power of the discourse, and he used a lot of means to expose the anti-human nature of the modern state system, the education system, the environmental system, and he elevated art to the same height as his contemporaries anthropology and sociology, but his intellectual composition was very classical. He used many means to expose the anti-human nature of the modern state system, education system, and environmental system, and he elevated art to the same height as his contemporaries in anthropology and sociology, but his intellectual composition was very classical, and the artists he admired were Leonardo da Vinci and Goethe, the philosophy he adhered to was the nineteenth-century anthroposophy of Steiner, and the religion he believed in was shamanism. I think this is where Boyce’s paradox lies – he elevated art to the level of anthropology and sociology, which is the same as Leonardo da Vinci’s contribution to elevating art to the level of science, both of which their previous art had not been able to reach, but at the same time Boyce’s paradox also lies in the fact that he maintains a certain kind of classical sentiment, which is the biggest part of his tail. But at the same time, Beuys’s paradox is that he maintained a certain classical sensibility, which was his biggest tail, a tail that emphasized the transcendental nature of human nature, and this transcendental, universal humanism was exactly what Althusser and Foucault had criticized. Boyce’s expanded concept of art has two meanings: one is “social sculpture,” which seeks to break down specialized and institutionalized artistic disciplines and maximize the energy of their public activities; the other is “everyone is an artist,” which treats art as a kind of universal, democratic creativity. The other is “everyone is an artist”, which treats art as a universal, democratic creativity. This kind of artistic humanism is the tail of his classicism, and it is what greatly limits his openness as a contemporary artist.

The great paradox of man’s knowledge of himself is that every human being has limitations, but in knowing himself man always hopes to find something that transcends such limitations. In classical times, man found a substitute for “God”, but in Kant’s time, he began to try to turn this limitation into a basis for knowledge about the certainty of facts, and for the first time, he realized that man’s greatest characteristic as an animal is that the subject of cognition and the object of cognition are one and the same, and that man acquires cognition through his own organizational behavior. But this theory does not answer the question of how one can know oneself beyond one’s own limitations, and in the end it only preserves the metaphysical myth of the “thing-in-itself”. It is this myth that Foucault seeks to expose, that man can only know himself within his own limitations, and that no conception of the transcendental knowing subject can provide corroborative knowledge, and thus he is opposed to humanism in its universal and absolute sense, because such a theory, which takes false imagination as its ethical goal, can only lead to two results, one of which is authoritarianism; the other is anarchy. In this sense, Foucault’s critique of humanistic science, Althusser’s critique of ideological power, and Popper’s critique of historical determinism all point to the dangers of abstract humanism: it often becomes an accomplice to authoritarianism.

The limitations of Beuys’s abstract artistic humanism have influenced the direction of contemporary art since Beuys’s time: one is that contemporary art has not escaped from the control of real power, but has instead become the object of enslavement by more socialized control systems (e.g., museums, biennial exhibitions, curators, etc.) and more complete systems of capital manipulation (art markets, auction houses, etc.); the other is that contemporary art has become more and more cynical and inhuman; art no longer really thinks about and explores its own culture; it no longer really thinks about and explores its own culture. On the other hand, contemporary art is becoming increasingly cynical and dehumanized, art is no longer really thinking about and exploring issues related to human beings, but has become a specialized practice controlled by a specific technical system. Contemporary Chinese art is successfully entering into this control system through the so-called internationalization.

Wang Jianwei:

Now we can see the flaws in Beuys’s statement that “everyone is an artist”, and his insistence on the transcendental part will eventually lead to the establishment of a new God’s system, which is precisely the biggest problem of the ideology criticized by Althusser, i.e., the successful replacement of the structural and imaginative system of an individual through the practice of physicalization. imaginative system for replacement. The significance of Beuys – and for me it is important – is that he does not reject the idea that any kind of experience or knowledge can be related to art, and having solved this problem, he believes that to a large extent all people can be related to contemporary art, but when he says that “everyone is an artist”, that is to say, “everyone is an artist”, that is to say, “everyone is an artist”, that is to say, “everyone is an artist”. But when he said “everyone is an artist”, that is, when he realized his humanitarianism, he potentially denied this thing, which Foucault also objected to, which implies a kind of discursive power, and I think that this sentence should be changed to “everyone can dislike art”, which is the real humanitarianism. I find humanitarianism to be particularly appealing as a talking point – “everyone is an artist” is first and foremost in the hands of the artist.

Beuys raised a lot of questions, he had a twofold nature, one is that he completely disrupted the original sense of contemporary art’s reflective critique and experimental in the philosophical sense starting from Duchamp, his creative heyday was synchronized with the emergence of Althusser and Foucault’s theories, and his whole life carried out the discourse of the real world’s critique of the power of the discourse, and he used a lot of means to expose the anti-human nature of the modern state system, the education system, the environmental system, and he elevated art to the same height as his contemporaries anthropology and sociology, but his intellectual composition was very classical. He used many means to expose the anti-human nature of the modern state system, education system, and environmental system, and he elevated art to the same height as his contemporaries in anthropology and sociology, but his intellectual composition was very classical, and the artists he admired were Leonardo da Vinci and Goethe, the philosophy he adhered to was the nineteenth-century anthroposophy of Steiner, and the religion he believed in was shamanism. I think this is where Boyce’s paradox lies – he elevated art to the level of anthropology and sociology, which is the same as Leonardo da Vinci’s contribution to elevating art to the level of science, both of which their previous art had not been able to reach, but at the same time Boyce’s paradox also lies in the fact that he maintains a certain kind of classical sentiment, which is the biggest part of his tail. But at the same time, Beuys’s paradox is that he maintained a certain classical sensibility, which was his biggest tail, a tail that emphasized the transcendental nature of human nature, and this transcendental, universal humanism was exactly what Althusser and Foucault had criticized. Boyce’s expanded concept of art has two meanings: one is “social sculpture,” which seeks to break down specialized and institutionalized artistic disciplines and maximize the energy of their public activities; the other is “everyone is an artist,” which treats art as a kind of universal, democratic creativity. The other is “everyone is an artist”, which treats art as a universal, democratic creativity. This kind of artistic humanism is the tail of his classicism, and it is what greatly limits his openness as a contemporary artist.

The great paradox of man’s knowledge of himself is that every human being has limitations, but in knowing himself man always hopes to find something that transcends such limitations. In classical times, man found a substitute for “God”, but in Kant’s time, he began to try to turn this limitation into a basis for knowledge about the certainty of facts, and for the first time, he realized that man’s greatest characteristic as an animal is that the subject of cognition and the object of cognition are one and the same, and that man acquires cognition through his own organizational behavior. But this theory does not answer the question of how one can know oneself beyond one’s own limitations, and in the end it only preserves the metaphysical myth of the “thing-in-itself”. It is this myth that Foucault seeks to expose, that man can only know himself within his own limitations, and that no conception of the transcendental knowing subject can provide corroborative knowledge, and thus he is opposed to humanism in its universal and absolute sense, because such a theory, which takes false imagination as its ethical goal, can only lead to two results, one of which is authoritarianism; the other is anarchy. In this sense, Foucault’s critique of humanistic science, Althusser’s critique of ideological power, and Popper’s critique of historical determinism all point to the dangers of abstract humanism: it often becomes an accomplice to authoritarianism.

The limitations of Beuys’s abstract artistic humanism have influenced the direction of contemporary art since Beuys’s time: one is that contemporary art has not escaped from the control of real power, but has instead become the object of enslavement by more socialized control systems (e.g., museums, biennial exhibitions, curators, etc.) and more complete systems of capital manipulation (art markets, auction houses, etc.); the other is that contemporary art has become more and more cynical and inhuman; art no longer really thinks about and explores its own culture; it no longer really thinks about and explores its own culture. On the other hand, contemporary art is becoming increasingly cynical and dehumanized, art is no longer really thinking about and exploring issues related to human beings, but has become a specialized practice controlled by a specific technical system. Contemporary Chinese art is successfully entering into this control system through the so-called internationalization.

Wang Jianwei:

Now we can see the flaws in Beuys’s statement that “everyone is an artist”, and his insistence on the transcendental part will eventually lead to the establishment of a new God’s system, which is precisely the biggest problem of the ideology criticized by Althusser, i.e., the successful replacement of the structural and imaginative system of an individual through the practice of physicalization. imaginative system for replacement. The significance of Beuys – and for me it is important – is that he does not reject the idea that any kind of experience or knowledge can be related to art, and having solved this problem, he believes that to a large extent all people can be related to contemporary art, but when he says that “everyone is an artist”, that is to say, “everyone is an artist”, that is to say, “everyone is an artist”, that is to say, “everyone is an artist”. But when he said “everyone is an artist”, that is, when he realized his humanitarianism, he potentially denied this thing, which Foucault also objected to, which implies a kind of discursive power, and I think that this sentence should be changed to “everyone can dislike art”, which is the real humanitarianism. I find humanitarianism to be particularly appealing as a talking point – “everyone is an artist” is first and foremost in the hands of the artist.

Huang Zhuan::

Foucault, Althusser, and Popper were not opponents of humanism, but rather exposed the controlling nature of traditional humanism; they were not opposed to the pursuit of truth, but rather to the absolutization of truth, which can only be approached slowly through the rejection of fallacies, the resistance to control, or the practice of trial-and-error knowledge. Why do we have a habit of saying the “right” thing? Because behind the “right” words there is often a shadow of power, which gives us an illusory sense of security, but hides the truth. On the contrary, sometimes the “wrong” thing to say can free you from some kind of control, and we need the practice of saying the wrong thing to slowly get closer to the truth. Abstract artistic humanitarianism imposes a new control system on us while creating legitimacy in contemporary art.

Wang Jianwei:

“Serving the people” is a case of humanitarianism. When you put forward ‘serving the people’, you are already standing on a higher position than ‘the people’. Ethical gestures are often a sign of establishing discursive power. I prefer to talk about the cycle of knowledge, power, and control in terms of a relationship – Eco said that everything around anything could be an encyclopedia. That is, whoever has power determines the legitimacy of his associations with other things, and eventually it becomes about how to contest that legitimacy. I think today we’re deeply involved in the contestation of that legitimacy, as Bourdieu said, he said that the greatest violence in modern society is the contestation of legitimacy. When an individual’s ideology disappears, you get the sense that he’s getting more and more accurate in that statement, that knowledge itself has taken a back seat. Rather, who is in control of its uniqueness? In my vocabulary, one of the words I will often use is “legitimacy”.

Huang Zhuan::

Today in the gallery I asked you if video art has gained some kind of “legitimization” today, and what we want to examine is why video art is considered legitimate today? How did this process come about?

Wang Jianwei:

I think we need to archaeologize the micro-discourse. For example, when we talk about “video installation” today, in a large sense, the four words that make up the term are already legitimate. But there are two sides to it, one is that compared to professionalism, this legitimacy is not a problem, but contemporary art only stops in this sense is meaningless, not legitimate; but for the audience, because they are controlled by “silence”, they think this legitimacy is meaningful. It is even very avant-garde and critical, which is a paradox. Therefore, artists need to have a kind of self-criticism and knowledge system to keep alert to such micro-discourse at all times. And to maintain a minimum ethical line, not to profit from this kind of spatial difference.

Huang Zhuan::

Yes, artists need to resist this professional “micro-discourse”.

Wang Jianwei:

For me, what I think about “theater” is, firstly, can it provide a space to form a dialogue mechanism with other knowledge? Secondly, in this space, because of its possible association with other knowledge, it will bring about a series of changes in the discourse mechanism, and around these changes, it will bring about technical and artistic synthesis. Comprehensive art forms have existed for a long time, for example, film and theater are actually comprehensive art forms, but the “synthesis” we are talking about today is the synthesis of methodologies and new media from different fields of knowledge.

Huang Zhuan::

Trying not to let anyone define you provides room for the possibilities of art criticism. You are characterized by your vigilance against all control, which is almost unavoidable, but one needs to maintain a certain state of mind in order to oppose speaking in a “controlled” way, which is the rarest of all.

Jianwei Wang:

My work has always emphasized that no single element can have a single attribute, such as the body, the body in the biological sense, the body in the social sense – we can use different concepts in a temporal sense. In my work, I don’t want to present a dominant visual tendency, so my work can’t be read dominantly, in fact my work is a kind of masking presentation, offsetting, balancing, sharing. In “Signs”, I question whether ideology as culture can be read? Or can it only be read as a political symbol and a special belief of a certain class? Finally, I would like to emphasize the importance of personal ideology. It is relative to our social reality today that overemphasizes the collective and the mainstream. As “wave-particle two-way complementarity” has led me to accept contradictory and paradoxical worldviews from the natural sciences, I do not think that we should reject the possibilities that interdisciplinarity offers us.

Huang Zhuan::

One has to get used to having an enemy in one’s belly, and a true critic cannot have only one enemy. Said, for example, is both an enemy of Israel and an enemy of Arafat, because both are objects of his criticism. Every true critique must be a double critique. The “enemy in the belly” is actually the best state of critique. In your work I can read “subtleties” and “gaps”, because you presuppose many “enemies”, and sometimes ideology is your enemy, and you have to avoid that! Sometimes ideology is your enemy, and you have to avoid losing your ability to fight against control due to simple class position; sometimes aesthetics is your enemy, and you have to be wary of too beautiful a picture; sometimes you have to face the temptation of professional technology, and you have to be wary of being too witty – a lot of young artists in China have good qualities, but they are always being led by their cleverness, and they can’t stand up to the “wit”. The temptation to be “witty”, “brilliant” and appreciated.

In Chinese philosophy, I think Laozi is better than Confucius. Laozi thoroughly doubted knowledge, and believed that wherever there is wisdom, there cannot be “Tao”, which is much higher than Buddhism, which seeks to pursue wisdom, while Laozi was wary of wisdom, because wisdom would obscure our realization of “Tao”. Confucius attempted to use an ethical knowledge to guide the right and wrong of daily behavior, while Lao Tzu believed that Confucius’ “rituals” could not be read, and that once one knew the “rituals,” one was far from the “Tao. True wisdom can not be said and do not have to say, the so-called “Road can be Road, very Road”, “knowers do not say, sayers do not know”, “big sound”, “big debate if the Nei”, “big debate if the Nei”. The great argument is like a voice. This is not the same as Wittgenstein’s “silence”, Wittgenstein is talking about something we can not recognize we can not speak, Laozi is saying that there is no need for us to recognize, silence is not because of the inability to recognize the silence, but once the “recognition”, it is far away from the “recognition”, the “recognition”, the “recognition”, the “recognition”, the “recognition”, the “recognition”, the “recognition”, the “recognition”. Silence is not silence because we cannot know, but once we “know”, we are farther away from the “Tao”. Of course, it is easy to go to mysticism, but Lao Tzu’s understanding of knowledge should have reached the highest level. There are two kinds of “silence”, the “unspeakable” and the “unspeakable”, and Laozi emphasizes the former, while we often encounter the latter in the empirical world.