Chengdu-Pompidou: International Art Biennale of the Global City

Chengdu-Pompidou: The Global City International Art Biennale is organized by the Mao Jihong Art Foundation in collaboration with the Centre Pompidou National d’Art et de Culture and the Chengdu Media Group in Chengdu, Sichuan Province, China. Relying on the concept of the city of Chengdu, the exhibition creates a thought-provoking simulation of the city through a variety of digital works, installations, photographs, and video images, in order to envision new ways to utilize smart technology and eco-smartness, and to advance social values.

Wang Jianwei’s work in this exhibition, the “All Things Born” series of installations, explores the relationship between nature and humanity, as well as the role that tools and technology play in this, and the artist argues that the work seeks to “exclude those things that are perceived by ‘us’, and that can be excluded from the outside, the localized. According to the artist, the work seeks to “shed light on those things that have been excluded by ‘our’ cognition, those things that are localized and can be said with certainty,” as well as to reexamine some of the hierarchical concepts and antagonistic relationships between human beings and nature in the conventional mindset.

The materials used in the new work A Geological Input-Output of Time are nickel, a metallic element widely found in the earth’s crust and core, the fifth most abundant element on earth, mainly mineralized 500 million years ago. All the materials in the installation originally came from the industrialized steel market, and the artist reworked them into monolithic modules similar to those used in large-scale infrastructural projects, and then made them repeat rhythmically, where the conglomeration of ancient time an