Production

Teahouse’ used to be a very important theme in Wang Jianwei’s works. As a practice of video sociological investigation, Wang began to shoot Production in the teahouses in six counties around Chengdu, Sichuan Province in 1996. The name ‘Production’ means that on the one hand, this work is a scene created by the artist through ‘artistic production’, and on the other hand, this work is concerned with the scene ‘produced’ by the public life. In this film, we see that although the ‘teahouse’ is a public living space, it also accommodates many private spaces. Here public and private spaces coexist and erode each other. All these ‘production’ relations and spatial overlaps profoundly reflect the relationship between social space, urban change and cultural production. 1997, this work was selected for the 10th Kassel Documenta after the exhibition ‘Another Long March’ in Breda, the Netherlands. Documenta. It was also the first Chinese video work to be exhibited at Documenta.