Lu Mingjun：Rehearsal: A Politics Oriented Towards Time

Lu Mingjun：Rehearsal: A Politics Oriented Towards Time
Lu Mingjun

The ancient Greek mathematician Zeno of Elea often said that when any object is placed within a space of equal size to itself – a space that is not greater than itself– it is then at rest. If objects in shift are always found at any given ‘now’ to be occupying such a space, then the arrow in flight is motionless.  This constitutes his famous paradox on movement, the paradox of the ‘motionless arrow’. Aristotle however, found Zeno’s paradox to be false, but he did acknowledge that if one is to say that time is composed up of ‘nows’ that an arrow would at that moment be still. Here, let us not go into questions of whether this paradox is valid or not, but in Wang Jianwei’s eyes, Zeno’s ‘Paradox of the Arrow’ sparked a new means of comprehending and understanding the ‘contemporary’. It movement and at rest, it is linear and without any linearity, it encompasses the past, the present and the future, but at the same time it obliterates any such differentiation or partitioning. In his 2005 work Flying Bird is Motionless, Wang Jianwei would interpret his understanding of moments of time and the present through theatrical performances and their rehearsal.
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Almost once decade later, at the opening of Wang Jianwei’s solo exhibition “Time Temple”  at the Guggenheim Museum in New York, one could detect that he is once again returning to these same questions, continuing to utilize the medium of performance as well as disengaging himself from it for new material and form. With this, the ‘Paradox of the Arrow’ ceases to be a paradox limited to the ideas between movement and motionlessness, between linearity and non-linearity; what concerns Wang Jianwei are the intervals and surpluses created in the encounters and collisions of the moments of ‘now’.  In this dimension, he erases the specialized discourses on regionality, class, gender, identity etc. instead taking a method and standpoint of “Universality” to reflect upon the contemporary and real world. Wang Jianwei believes that what one encounters oneself is not the politics and society of our experience, but is instead the predicament of reality faced by all contemporary people. In his eyes, this is the true reality within a context of globalization; it is a reality in China as it is in Europe, a reality the world over. However, what he concerns himself with is the interior of this reality and its inherent logic, not the superficiality of political societies and ideologies. It is probable that thus far, it is difficult for us to clearly judge or linguistically classify the causes.

Wang Jianwei was not party to the ’85 New Wave Art Movement nor the “Political Pop” and “Cyncial Realism” movements of the 1990s which swept through China and the political realism lead by artists of the Chinese Diaspora. Hou Hanru places him instead within the “New Analysts Group” and the “Big Tail Elephant Group” with Geng Jianyi and Shi Weikang, which can be summarized by their newfound tendency to deconstruct “ideologically centrist” “non-unofficial art”, differentiated from intentional and mainstream unofficial or anti-establishment art. However, as he says “true revolution occurs when there is total mistrust for all things extant, including you own personal affairs.” This signifies that for him “non-unofficial art” is itself also an object which should be called into question.
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The 1980s and 1990s, though nominally periods of greater emancipation and enlightenment towards the individual, were in fact still relatively collectivist in their logic and methodologies. In the 80s, perhaps we had already cast aside revolutionary collectivism, but we had entered into a different form of collectivism, the so-called “Enlightened Collectivism”. Entering into the 90s, the forces of the market economy did not at all usher in any new-fangled sense of individual reasoning, instead lead to yet another collectivism centered on popular cultural crazes. We are anything but strangers from these phenomena. The regrettable fact is that “Enlightened Collectivism” and the “Popular Cultural Crazes” do not appeal to the enlightened, the mark of enlightenment residing in whether or not a reasoned individual can mould an introspective consciousness, unlike individual politics which can easily be engulfed by collectivism. Despite this, unlike the collectivism on the 1980s, the 1990s were seemingly an era full of differences, from the “Reflections on the Humanistic Spirit” and the “Struggle between the New Left and Liberalism” in the intellectual sphere, to “Big Discussion on Meaning” and “Post-colonial Criticisms” in the art world, bringing people into areas of contention. Yet the reconstruction and conceptual polarization of self-identity did not influence or even touch upon Wang Jianwei’s artistic practice. He cast away a simplistic binary logic, placing himself firmly in a grey in-between area from which he did not direct himself against any ideology. If there had been, it could only have been the idea of ideology itself. As Wang Jianwei himself has said, the works in themselves probably look very complicated, but complexity was not the goal, for what he is interested in is expressing doubts towards the order of all that is ready-made, because only this can be the place where the energy of art resides, which in turn becomes his work. It goes without saying that in an era which from beginning to end is unable to escape from under the shadow of ideology, this sort of reflection and practice when approached from any angle does not seem the most “correct”.
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I.

In 1997, responding to an invitation by the curator Catherine David, Wang Jianwei took part in the 10th Kassel Documenta. The central focus of that Documenta was “the image of culture and the expression of form” whose basic philosophy was how does contemporary art embody the power of aesthetics and politics in a globalised world. The work of Wang Jianwei that was shown at the exhibition was his video piece Production which by means of a social investigation, recorded the personal responses of residents of seven cities in Sichuan Province in response to questions of how to derive private space from superfluous public areas and through a complex relationship how to apply this to overlap with daily life. It is an unembellished video work, extremely simple from the material to the executed form within which we find narrative and concept, which at the same times makes it difficult for us to go about defining or classifying it. If one were to call it a form of fine art and politics, then this vague, unascertainable and questioning stance indicates that it is in fact more akin to the creation of an anti-art and anti-political practice. But what Wang Jianwei primarily concerns himself with apart from the order by which existing intellectual systems and ideologies are in the long-term dominated and hijacked, is whether or not a territory exists where it would be possible to emit a different form of sound. For Wang Jianwei, the small talk heard in tea shops constitutes an inherently created discourse and medium; this repeated (through something like a rehearsal) form of conversation including the content of all the patrons’ irrelevant conversations, ultimately result in the obliteration of the subject. Therefore, this form of observation is nothing but a means for him to ignite new comprehension and knowledge towards the subjects of history and reality amongst others.

This perhaps was the reason for Catherine David’s choice of the aforementioned work. If one considers her appreciation of the work as a reflection of art and politics in a globalised China, then in no way is different from the previously dominant view from the 90s of Chinese contemporary art’s cultural-political identity.  Greater importance resides in the fact that if one were to consider the so-called right-left struggle as a result of the  “impact – response” carried alongside globalization, then all that Production provides is conversely the narrative grey-zone of the ideologization of “no impact – no response.” Naturally, in the content of any artistic system that has, in the long run, been abducted by ideology, Wang Jianwei’s vigilance guards not only against the ideas and stance of an ideology, but also against the possibility of a work’s stylization, conceptualization, even against the risks presented by an artworks possible institutionalization. In fact, before Production, he was already beginning to test out a practice of “grey systems”; with any reservations he might have towards the system and its order (including any self-doubts) become the starting point for his thoughts.

Bruno Latour has states that the directions followed art and science, although different, are both fabrications and even in their methods are in essence not dissimilar.  Wang Jianwei doesn’t evade the theory of “grey systems” which has from the beginning inspired and influenced him.  Early on in the beginning of the 1980s, the Chinese mathematician Deng Julong proposed this theory which utilizes uncertain and small amounts of information to research questions, for since uncertain systems naturally occur on earth, therefore these are often used for testing changes in the realm of natural sciences. Up until the 1990s, its use was most widespread in the area of agriculture, water management and meteorological forecasting. Wang Jianwei’s 1992 Document was his first experiment with these “grey systems”. In this work, he took the format of a document to dispel viewing, and initiated those “grey areas” and intermingled transitional spaced to simultaneously entwine with the process of scientific experimentation and give birth to a predictive signal.  Reassessing it today, one finds that the language perhaps is not the most mature, but at the time, this way of thinking made a very deep impression on his future practice. Idea, Process, State from the following year also blurred the boundaries between art, science and philosophy, as well as the vague border between the individual and society. In addition to this, one can look to the 1994 project Circulation [9][10]– Sowing and Harvesting. Wang Jianwei returned to the rural community he had once had to live in and signed an agreement with the local farmers: The farmers would take one field of earth as a test plot in which they would plant a new strain of wheat provided by him. The farmers take care of the planting, but the risks and returns would be shared by both parties. The test plot in the end would produce 400 kg of wheat, more than 50kg more than any of the other local fields. Wand Jianwei and the farmers split the harvest into four parts: one part paid as tax on the grain, one part left as seed for the next season, one part grain for the farmers, and one part for Wang Jianwei himself. He documented the entire planting and harvesting process on a point-and-shoot camera, delving into the new relationships built upon his “artist identity” when this enters into new domains.

Wang Jianwei sees sight as a “scientific laboratory”, he attempts to build an extremely subjectified correlation between attributes of the material world and the skills of society, intending to expel the subject from the identity of an artist and transfer it to a neutral object. Hereby, the artist ceases to be the subject himself and instead becomes an object of its suspicion. This doubt, beside from hinging upon his realizations of history and reality, also stems from his attitudes and awareness towards knowledge itself. In the physicist Niels Bohr’s Complimentarity Principle of Wave-Particle Duality, one key point from this principle is that “the complimentarity between two types opposing images” ignited his thoughts and understanding of the nature knowledge and art itself. He was finally aware that although there are inherent doubts and resistance in the substance of thought, knowledge is not an annotation or idea of art, and artistic practice neither shares the same boundaries as knowledge, nor exists in the same intermediary confines. However it is important to note that this does not permit for one form of knowledge to act as dictator, to abduct or hijack other forms of knowledge or non-knowledge, and no system exists which can act to prop up another system.

In addition to Deng Julong and Bohr’s theories, Wang Jianwei does not repudiate the impact philosophers and scientists such as Einstein in the field of physics, Foucault in archaeology, Bourdieu in the social realm, Althusser’s theories on medical symptoms and later Alain Badiou, Slavoj Zizek, Jacques Rancière and Giorgio Agamben have had on his way of thinking. It can be said that the few dominant forms Wang Jianwei’s later works would take such as towards theatre, rehearsals and time all surfaced from thoughts and reflections on these schools of thought. What possibly makes it difficult to understand for some people is that Wang Jianwei on the one hand rejects interpretation but on the other cultivates a great personal passion towards the sensitivities of knowledge and discourses. This is obviously somewhat of a paradox. But the fact of the matter is that Wang Jianwei has never seen the latter as a way of interpreting or clarifying his practice and works, even more so it has never been a theoretical footnote in his works. On the contrary, knowledge in such a situation is not an appendage of art, and is only a form of self-sufficient practice. According to Wang Jianwei, this cannot just be a part-time activity, making it even less strategic in nature. As he remembers, in the long period of time between the late 1980s and early 90s he did not make a single artwork, but spent the time reading an immense amount of philosophical and scientific works describing all manner of theories and principles. It was also during this time that he realized that there are no boundaries between disciplines, that knowledge is palpable, and that it is a conscious practice possessesing its own introspection and questions. Then the question would seem to be how is it that this type of scientific experiment and knowledge all lead to a form of politics?

In their book Leviathan and the Air-Pump: Hobbes, Boyle, and the Experimental Life, the authors Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer have already provided us with a response to this question.  They concern themselves with modern science’s emergence in relation to the establishment of a specified society and orderly political system; in other words, the emergence of modern science is interlocked with the emergence of an ordered political system in the Western world. Of course, science and politics both seek to answer questions of order and sequentiality. For Boyle, the fact is that the important measures undertaken in the creation of an ordered community lead to the production of the air pump as the high mark for these communities. In contrast, Hobbes believed that you must first understand the relevance between man, society, and nature through geometry and mechanics.  As for the struggles and disagreements between the two, who won and who lost we for the time being will not go into that, what is key here so that lifestyles molded by scientific experimentation already inherently constitute a new understanding of politics. This is the reason why I brought up this text; I wanted to investigate how Wang Jianwei started off a new sort of politics amongst scientific experimentation, knowledge and society. He naturally did not do it in order to create a certain order but is instead a way of questioning its nature. In any sort of meaning this entails two sharply varying politics. It is similar to how his planting and harvesting project         exceeded all previous production experience and knowledge, this meaning has in a sense constructed something more. Therefore, although his artwork at first glance would seem participatory, Wang Jianwei’s goal is not to augment harvest potential and it is also not a banal attempt to change society’s modes of production leading to public attention. Rather one could say that the growing fields of wheat are his studio and his interest is only testing the doubts and cracks within existing experiential hierarchies.
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Wang Jianwei does not find it worth to be a superficial dissident or well-known star, his real aim resides in how to open up the existing construct of “being for being” and the possibility of freedom. Here, were we to return and once again look at Production, it no longer seems to provide any anti-aesthetic anti-political sentiment, instead concerns itself with the possibility of an existing aesthetic and political order within an extremely aestheticized and political daily existence, furthermore, how to compose potential questions and responses for the former. After this, society entered into his color documentary film Life is Elsewhere (1998-99), but still he was not simply expressing one situation, and has the intention of having incidents lead into an even more open and obviously complex dimension. It is necessary to point out at that compared to his reflections and debates on urbanization related to the intellectual world in his 2002-03 work Three Farmers, Wang Jianwei’s experiments advance at least every one or two years and even the earliest has touched upon the questions relevant to his artistic practice.
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However, his concern is not for any concrete approach to debate or the validity of politics, but go beyond this into the question of whether or not these can provide a grey  “reality”. Hou Hanru has defined this method as “imitating the rules”, and feels that from the beginning it is “anti-ideological”, “neutral”, and deals with “everydayness” but is not trying to raise this “everydayness” up to the level of “established discourse”, instead taking the ‘imitation rules” objectified implementation in line with the quotidian as a trivial connection. By intimating the regulations guarding the movement process of established ideologies whose connotation is in the actual meaninglessness of the relationship between art and daily life, thereby the artist provides a replacement for an “ideological center theory” and opens up a special path for art to enter into reality. This also clarifies that Wang Jianwei’s methods are not suspended above reality, and his experiments are planted precisely in the living skin of reality.  I believe that this grey truth is precisely those “tumor”-like overflow and superfluous objects that often appear in his installations. Wang Jianwei believes that this is the product of a relationship which possesses partial validity, however and instance of partial validity is not enough to deduce validity in whole, therefore what he really focuses on is in what sort of sequentiality with its inherent struggles and systematic contradictions are these ‘tumors’ that become excess material truly rooted.
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Ten years later, at the beginning of 2008 in Wang Jianwei’s “Hostage” solo exhibition at the Zendai Museum of Modern Art Shanghai, he used a multi-layered focused presentation to investigate into dreams and ambition within capitalism and modern industry’s crazed development in contemporary China, and how it has been held hostage by the systems and power of intellect, history and ideology. Not with coincidence, a few months later, the economic crisis started in America would lead the Western economies into an economic quagmire from which they have still not fully recovered. China was not only uninfluenced by this, but was even able to successfully host the 29th Summer Olympic Games, thereby stepping forward and revealing its new position on the global political and economic stage, taking advantage of this as a basis for defending its newfound institutional and ordered validity. Therefore, in one sense, I feel that Wang Jianwei’s practice acted as a reflective omen.

II.

Wang Jianwei is not an isolated case, for instance the others of the “New Analyst Group” are also trying to implement an intellectual practice and they were already acquainted with one another in the early 1990s, influencing each others concepts and methodologies. The “New Analyst Group” have borrowed from the same language (quantitative relations/measurements) as that of the orderly manner of the contemporary post-industrial information society, to found a distinctly defined and expressed artistic form.  In the same vein, Wang Jianwei’s tacit attempts to build a new artistic framework, “an exhibition construct formed by means of a comprehensive significance (including material, social and anthropological) of experimental understanding”. In his view, “the significance of the framework resides in a henceforth complete grasp of accuracy, and in fully displaying comprehensive knowledge and a holistic socio-cultural joint-mechanism alongside a multi-exposed cognitive state and cultural form”. This differs in the fact that Wang Jianwei’s aim is not knowledge itself, and knowledge is not the only medium or discursive vessel; he is more concerned with science and how knowledge can in turn lead to the possibility of a new politics. Here Wang Jianwei although not taking a clear concept as a starting point for his thoughts and experiments, also does not appeal to a verified response, but this is by no means because of having renounced experience. Experience is a core material of his practice and conversely becomes a premise for binds together his suspicions and mediates his experience. History is no longer an object to be evaded, and there is also no need to withdraw or suspend oneself from reality, and in choosing a medium of theatre one once again enters into history and reality, thus leading us into a new dimension of time and events, one found in the intricate web of relations in personal experience and openness.
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It was around this time that Nicolas Bourriaud’s Relational Aesthetics was published in Paris and caused much fervor and widespread discussion. Bourriaud’s key points are that contemporary works are not just experiential spaces but spaces of personal experience, a starting point for limitless discussion. This signifies that in essence they are in reality the base material for interactive subjects, and “being with” as the core of artistic form in the “confluence” of viewer and painting, the collective construct of meaning.  At the time, Wang Jianwei saw himself as creating works which sought to embody even more relationships in his scenes, because he felt that there are many invisible factors which decide the relations between what is seen, which at the moment we delve greater into judgment of them often reveal themselves in the form of a relation.  From this we can see that Wang Jianwei was perhaps the first Chinese artist who was to be latently connected with the tides of experimentation in European art. Of course, unlike most of the Chinese and ethnic-Chinese artists who travelled overseas, he does not resort to gestures of identity and politics but is conscientious of the fundamental identity and discourses on art. His so-called “theatre” (including “rehearsals”) is in this symptomatic style of historical reality, with archaeological relations in his practice creating an important method and conceptuality. Amongst this, it is not only a choice between experience and non-experience, history and the ahistorical, control and non-control, and is not a flat, still grey region, but a moving, three-dimensional, even ‘disordered’ independent field. If one were to say that previously he was attempting to create a gap in the realm of science, then here theater is “supplanting” science, in turn becoming a new political pattern.  But in actual fact, we can still discern the influence of science within it, for example the profound influence of Bohr’s non-linear, non-temporal, separated and divided atomic theory.
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Historically speaking, theatre has from its earliest beginnings always played a political role, which is to say that the identity of theatre possesses political capabilities and attributes. Aristotle’s Poetics elaborates upon the theories of tragedy, stating that the inherent quality of tragedy is that of political theater, shouldering a political or educational function. Up until the Renaissance, when alongside the development of commerce and the birth of the bourgeoisie, new forms of art, thinking, theatre and poetics emerged.  Machiavelli was one of the most important observers of this shift, asserting that mankind has been unbound from the ties of moral value, which have been replaced by a golden thread: a life and bearing governed by the spirit of enterprise, hard work and cold reason. The 19th century playwright Bertolt Brecht inherited Hegel’s dialectical poetics and Marx’s materialism to initiate a poetics of action and raised a new flag which clearly indicated that an artist must free themselves from the palace stage and become an artist of the people, entering into the community. Coming into the 20th Century the mad Antonin Artaud founded the “Theater of Cruelty” which completely toppled the existing order of the theatrical world, which in the same vein as Duchamp, John Cage and Rauschenberg would set of a formidable cultural-political revolution, whose brief political history in the realm of theater we are familiar with. What cannot be overlooked is the path of logical thinking in intellectual circles which came about parallel to this revolution. This can also be taken as an aspect of Wang Jianwei’s historical dependence on “Theater[19]–Knowledge–Politics” in his practice. Nevertheless, what is important to note is that after Artaud’s revolution, what more could theater and its politics hope to accomplish? Perhaps, Wang Jianwei diversion towards theater was not started from a point of observing the history of theater, but theater has undoubtedly become the medium he resorts to to resolve the important linguistic patterns between art and politics.

For his 2000 work Screen, Wang Jianwei for the first time used the medium of theater to revisit the famous painter of the Five Dynasties Gu Hongzhong’s masterpiece The Night Revels of Han Xizai. This work is an over three-meter scroll painting which depicts the scene of an evening banquet given by the Northern Minister Han Xizai from the Southern Tang Dynasty. With Han Xizai as the focus of the entire scroll, the rest of the composition is divided up into different scenes all with him present as focus: flute playing, dancing, resting, the playing of string instruments, and the end of the banquet and the dispersal of the guests.  The scroll implies the double view of Gu Hongzhong by which he also becomes a “Peeping Tom” on the surface of the painting, as well as the painter himself. Wang Jianwei attempted to superimpose video, theater and performance onto each other to discover a renewed approach to ascertaining the cracks in history and reality, attempting to thoroughly expose this doubled gazing within a new theatrical stage and shifted scenery, taking history as the only subject and releasing the gaze from domination. One could even say that is a deduction and inference similar to Foucault’s discourse of Las Meninas.

In this narrative painterly media, the form of the hand scroll possesses a particular viewing manner, something more akin to reading based in time, not lacking overlaps with our experience of a theatrical performance, which is to say that it in many ways constitutes a play. In the painting, each scene inhabits its own individual unit, each unit outfitted with balanced forms of interior furniture, amongst which a folding screen is the most prominent.  Here the screen takes on a function more like that of a constructed stage prop. In Wang Jianwei’s narrative, it becomes something like an original text, acting as a sort of limitation, and as a region of possible release.  The “archaeology” of history first of all constructs the first layer. The purpose of the “screen” is to shelter or conceal, as the narrative of history itself is to conceal reality and the naked truth. Of course between Gu Hongzhong’s peeping and Wang Jianwei’s narrative there also does not lack correlation with historical subjectivity. Consequently, the “screen” for Gu Hongzhong’s painting On top of this, “theater” constructs a second layer. Wang Jianwei “detaches” the original narrative description, rebuilding a new spatial narration. Where this differs from the hand scroll is that the methods of viewing the thearicalization are not only a form of reading, but also are a way of experiencing which is to say a way of interacting and partaking. At this time, the relations amongst the different media and amongst figures do not only conform to those of the order of the original, but also become reciprocal chiasma, reciprocal manipulations, mutual dependencies, mutual rejections, and codependent portrayals, amidst a relationship impossible to define or judge. Herewith a third layer is added, namely that of “rehearsal”. Regarding rehearsal, the most correct explanation would be a director’s careful examination of the script with the actors, a way of resolving questions on the life and explanation of character traits; another side of this is to sufficiently excite each actor’s creative potential, leading them to approach their role and complete the image creation said role entails. It is by no means solely a re-creation of the original text: rebuilding a complete narrative is not Wang Jianwei’s aim, instead it is just the cracks inherent in the nature of performance itself which lead the order of the original work and script into unknown terrain. Therefore, theatre is by nature a form of production, and history reiterates the rehearsal and the resurrection within the ceaseless restarting which nonetheless produces cracks.
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Performance by no means acts as a narrative framework for Screen, but by way of Screen’s derivatives, methods and means of theatrical practice become the subject of Wang Jianwei’s later theater works, an important method and concept in Wang Jianwei’s artistic practice. It seems as if from the viewpoint of the artwork’s form, the performance and video in Screen first of all preinstall a polyphonic narrative construct, but obviously the performance and video early on already broke free from the narratives of their mediums, and shifted onto multi-temporal encounters, and converged together with the wrinkles of multiple actions. Here, each repeated time seems as a dossier, and what Wang Jianwei wants to do is not classify these records but erect a controller, and re-examine the relevance and cohesion of these records and dossiers. It goes without saying that the dossiers themselves are being constantly written and reconstructed. Each time they are written constitutes a complete individual text, and each individual text will meet with disparate interventions, interventions that are not undertaken to create divergence, but to limit the possibility of divergence. This point is also embodies in Wang Jianwei’s Link, Our Visual… Me and Us, and Bukharin whatever…. and such series of works, in which he takes  various images, events, and times and compresses them onto a flat plane of time, thereby contradicting the relations of history, culture and reality. In Wang Jianwei’s opinion, what is called history is in fact solely the result of an unceasing textual rehearsal, and in fact it is possibly precisely in these disparate rehearsal constructs in which bifurcations and gaps arise. Rehearsal in this sense is not a method, it is not waiting for any external surprise but from the beginning has promulgated resistance to its enemies: improvisation and randomness. Therefore, speaking from the most basic position, rehearsal takes place under a limitation, locating material and objects in the process of inspired potential. This process is often embodied as a sort of ceremony, more accurately as a permissible or unavoidable process of deviation, a disconnected practice implementing corrective and adjective actions. This is similar to that which he wished to communicate through Ceremony and Flying Birds Don’t Move, where the ceremony does not bear the weight of any cultural, ethical or political meaning and only fulfils the form of a rehearsal.
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Thus, I would like to return to theater, to a perspective of political history, in which it is necessary examine the history of Wang Jianwei’s practice, despite the fact that he may have admitted to the existence of such a history. If we say that Artaud completely subverted the discipline of theater and its political order, then Wang Jianwei at the very least has re-returned to this order through form. He still endlessly quotes a fair number of basic paradigms from modern and ancient theater performances, but Wang Jianwei’s goal is not to return to the order of theater, but to take links created by theater and the subject of rehearsal as his subject. IN other words, within the limits of this existing order, the aim of rehearsal is on the one hand to create order and on the other, when rehearsal becomes the main subject, it undoubtedly creates confusion and destroys the nature of order itself. Therefore Wang Jianwei installs strict performative requirements and an excessively classical sense of ceremony despite the fact that he does not aim for ceremony nor wishes to reiterate the rehearsal per se, but instead reveals the cracks produced in rehearsal and the possibility of igniting its entire potential. Here rehearsal is not confined to the stage, the museum or the studio but daily life also becomes the scene for rehearsal. Therefore, if one considers Artaud to not only have been opposed to rehearsal but even willing to throw away the script, then the script that Wang Jianwei newly picked up shifts visual perception onto rehearsal. In this manner Wang Jianwei unlike Artaud does not wish to entirely uproot the theatrical tradition, but is only trying change the internal sequence and order of the art form. In this sense, he is more similar to Brecht not Artaud. At least in his form, Wang Jianwei has not thoroughly abandoned the traces of modernism, or one could go as far as to say that he intentionally uses the legacy of modernism in order to resist randomness and the momentary lack of control and boundlessness. However, in someway he is very similar to Artaud is in the lack of visible narrative focus or climax, which according to Wang Jianwei, he does not wish for any object to appear to be occupying a position of dominance because he is always on guard against any sort of manifestation of power. In other words, Wang Jianwei on the one hand sustains the ceremonies of modernity, but on the other fully abandons the classifications and order of modernity, which is to say that for Wang Jianwei, Artaud and Brecht are not entirely different, but this history in no means acts as a premise or reference in his artistic practice. In Claire Bishop’s Artificial Hells: Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship, considers all art forms which involve the public and have a participatory nature to be a form of theater (political). Wang Jianwei can also not deny the importance of social reality in theater, but he does not focus on the involvement and effects greater society has in theater but on the invisible levels of knowledge and possibilities within the politics of the theater.
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III.

Brecht said, “rehearsers do not wish to enter into the ‘reality’ of thoughts. Their mission is to arouse and organize their creative spirit. Rehearsing is experimentation; it excavates the multiple possibilities of the moment. The mission of those rehearsing is to expose any patterned, conventional or habitual solutions.” The aim of rehearsal lies in the distrust of its existing order, its nature decides the inability of a repeated practice, in other words it is non-repetition amidst repetitiveness. The extent of Wang Jianwei’s practice after Screen (in works such including Motionless Flying Bird, [25]闪躲》、《交叉感染》、《三岔口》、《人质》及《时间·剧场·展览) has his rehearsals undoubtedly enter on to important historical and realistic angles and paths. In 2010, Wang Jianwei completed his video and performance piece Welcome to the Desert of the Real, the title taken from the book of the same name by Slavoj Zizek. The content of the piece revolved around a young man from rural China moving to the big city and losing himself in a fictitious world of virtual reality, ultimately turning into a story of murder. Although this story is based in Chinese experience, it has implication in the worldwide phenomena of globalization and other pressing contemporary questions. The work travelled around Europe for a period of time, and in Wang Jianwei’s mind, this travelling performance unceasingly leads to unknown experiences, cleaving gaps between time and politics. But what is apparent in those instances is his vision is not only restrained to the local history and real experiences, but is gradually expanded onto a more globalised or universal domain.

If the performances in the works beginning with Screen emphasized the questions and disassociations within the existing order, then with his 2011 large-scale solo show at the Ullens Center of Contemporary Art in Beijing, the actual rehearsal itself became the goal, thereby opening a new dimension of time.

In June 2009, Wang Jianwei took part in Long March Space’s Ho Chi Minh Trail field study and academic dialogue project initiated by Lu Jie, alongside other artists and academics such as Lu Xinghua, Gao Shiming, Xu Zhen, Liu Wei, Zhang Hui as well as the Vietnamese artists and curators Dinh Q. Le and Nguyen Nhu Huy amongst others. “Yellow Signal” is a work which directly arose from the discussions at that time and was pressed out of “obsessive” discussion and dialogue. At first glance it looks as if it were created from an incidental theory, but for Wang Jianwei it involves many years of thinking and practice which has never deviated from this thread, therefore “Yellow Light” can be seen as an inevitable encounter. Regarding the concept behind this work, I believe no one can more accurately expound on his understanding when he says:

The yellow light is simultaneously faced with two valid enemies: in the green light’s valid termination and in the valid negation of the red light; it allows the unique loss of both sides to simultaneously obtain its own position:  a legitimate neutrality. It both interferes and acts as a go-between, turning control and prolongation into distinguishable “hard objects”.
“Yellow Signal” acts as an omen, providing a different method of viewing and understanding the material. We attempt to create a scene of contradiction and entanglement. An en-route state of affairs allowing matter to be constantly placed between permission and prohibition, between the active and the passive through repeated interruptions and amendments, making it impossible for the scene to fuse together, is it incompatible within a heterogeneous community? A yellow light community?
[26]

The exhibition amounted to a total of four chapters, including “Waiting for Forgeries”, “We Know What We’re Doing…”, “Interior War”, and “Going to Building 13’s Conference Room to Watch a Free Film”, were equally divided to show four complete performances in the exhibition space. Evidently, this method and exhibition structure inherently possesses qualities of the rehearsed In the exhibition; Wang Jianwei fully shifted the discourse on theater/performance, video, installation, painting and other media. Perhaps we have no means to thoroughly discern the significance in each performance, but by means of fragmented visual information one can delve deeper into the foundation of relevant experience. From the beginning, video, installation and performance constructed an immense theatre, both eliminating the relations amongst the various media and obscuring the relevance between the individual and the public space. Here, all performance is based in a real script, all capture social news taken out of daily life, only that Wang Jianwei does not simplistically re-display or reconstruct these experiences but resolves them through theatricality, intentionally obscuring and alienating the relationship between the various communal experiences shouldered by theater. This is similar to the inter-atomic transformations of Bohr’s physics leading to the release or absorption of light, and the incredible circumstances of dialogue which is perhaps an unavoidable digression or disorder amidst real order of political, social and quotidian experience. In my view, this installed rehearsal is more like a new poetics of life or a contrived attempt. In the second chapter “Circular Prison”, basketballs and national flags constitute backboards and other structures, constructing a collective logic under the concentration of power and control, thus exploring a “yellow region” within power, competitiveness and regulated practice. In my opinion, this firmly established it in the world that Foucault opened up, but also razes the order Foucault himself established as well. In the third chapter “Interior Battle”, Wang Jianwei used abandoned furniture from the 1950s-70s that he found at antiques markets, cut and re-formed them into nameless forms possessing characteristics of modernist aesthetics and color. The balance of the presentation conceals the interior struggle of order and the tension in meaning. This “disordered” assemblage clears away any primary capabilities and attributes, whilst provoking the experiences of the viewer in its newly formed shape and aesthetics, simultaneously hints at the interior construction extruding from itself and becoming a mechanical fact. Of course, what Wang Jianwei wants to expand upon is precisely this extrusion, and the nature of forms which cannot be categorized or named, the isolation within the constructed cognition. Hereby, it is not a performance prop, but in its nature a self-contained installation system. In the end, during the circulation and installation of the four exhibitions in the agglomeration of so many vocabularies in reality construct a new incompatible knowledge system and cognitive world, as well as a relation between this cognitive world and human beings. But Wang Jianwei deals not only with the mechanisms of knowledge, but more importantly how these mechanisms besiege human beings and limit one side of life. Here one needs to be reminded that Wang Jianwei’s theatre is based on a script, and if the first three chapters can be considered to constitute a ‘linear’ narrative, then after entering into the fourth chapter, this ‘linearity’ has thoroughly shifted into a synchronized occurrence, changed into a multi-temporal and multi-dimensional approach. He reveals an undefined shifting world, with every person captured by any of many types of knowledge systems, at the same time seemingly overflowing into a new type of intellect, creating an un-nameable time.  He fashions synchronized, even flat, realistic chaotic theatres, flatness and disorder are not Wang Jianwei’s goals though, and today these are not enough to form challenges to the existing order which have already been created, he awaits to see whether or not one can explore deeper into time and spacing within this interweaving and collision. In other words, he is not standing outside of order and opposing it, but creates separations and intervals of disorder within order, which is to say that he analyses the superfluous time extant within time, and isolates the wrinkles of politics within politics. Borrowing the words of Rancière, Wang Jianwei has said that Yellow Signal is a time and politics that is “current, constantly self-dividing, self-opening, dividing itself into a great number of new concepts from that which happened in the past.”

For Wang Jianwei the wrinkles of politics are undoubtedly dominated, scrambled for, and implemented by power, and do not signify the Foucaultian ratiocination that since there is power everywhere, there is politics everywhere; if there is power everywhere, then it is irrelevant if it is power or not. Speaking in the vein of Rancière who said, “politics is rare and ephemeral”, it only “exists in discontinuity, in the lack of any overall principle or within the implementation of any law. The only point of synchronity within this movement is in the existence of an empty operator within: dissensus.” Therefore, politics “is a disordered process of emancipation, within which the logic of disagreement is set against the logic of the police:” Ranci[27]ère by no means believes that art is a form with its own inherent regulations, on the contrary it concentrates on our experience’s opposition to the autonomous rhytmicity of art. Thereupon, he reiterates Kant’s principle of antinomies, saying that any aesthetic judgment (or formalist judgment) interrupts the dominance of rationality (in a moral sense) and intellectuality (in terms of knowing).  This vein of autonomy is suggestive of the possibility of politics (what is meant here is dissent or disagreement), because the indecipherability of the experience of aesthetic perception (or “pure form”) implies questioning of the order of the world, and thus explores change and redistributes those possibilities of this world. Similarly, in Wang Jianwei’s eyes, all existing orders and structures in essence all rely on a governable logic, but Wang Jianwei’s “politics” only expresses a posture of resistance, he expects more to start off a new dimension of time which has been tacitly sequenced by means of rehearsal. In this, we need not acknowledge any dominated order or discourse of control, for all that he ignites is a new pattern of politics rooted in universality.
[28]

From this, if we revisit his scientific experimentation and intellectual practice from the 1990s, these can now also be considered a similar type of rehearsal. The identity of his scientific experimentation, it goes without saying, were repeated attempts within an established regulation. How an intellectual practice would come to be seen as a form of rehearsal is because Wang Jianwei never believed that his own artworks were just intellectual footnotes, but he precisely utilized an his artistic experience to create cracks and intervals within an intellectual order. This disproves that there are in fact no limitations between art and the intellect, between science and theater, at least for Wang Jianwei who shares a method of rehearsal leading to a the advent of possibilities between matters. It is also because of this, that it leads to a loss or lack of nomenclature, and replaces its plan with a quality, time and parameters unrelated to the narrative of theater.
[29]

IV.

In September 2013, Wang Jianwei’s held his solo exhibition “… the event matured, accomplished in sight of all non-existent human outcomes” at Long March Space Beijing. The title for the exhibition comes from Mallarme’s A Toss of the Dice, which in Wang Jianwei’s personal interpretation takes the overflowed time from the encounter between occasionality and inevitability, and provides this time for our imagined future rationality. Compared to Yellow Signal and other earlier works, Wang Jianwei with this exhibition would become more restrained and cautious, he eliminated theater and performance, creating the materialized forms of the installation pieces and paintings from a state of disengagement. If one considers that in Yellow Signal, we can still feel his inevitable intensity and collisions, then here, all sentiments and contradictions have been compressed into cold form. It appears to be an immense shift, but his unwavering theatricality and spirit of rehearsal is still there.
[30]

Materialization does not necessarily imply stasis; here the nature of the paintings and installations is three-dimensional, moveable occurrences and incidents. This is not the materialization of rehearsal, nor is it just rehearsal itself. In other words, the key here resides in the formalization of rehearsal. Of course, form here is unlike that which Clement Greenberg called formalism and mediality, flatness and purity, which points to a sort of “unrelated” history and reality including ones own contemporary discourse.  It is also not the form and politics as extrapolated upon in Borriauld’s Relational Aesthetics and The Study of Art Ecology, which attempt to rely on perception and excitability to initiate understanding of the conceptual constructs of the world. Whereas Wang Jianwei intentionally resists the relationships between the ecologies of politics, society, culture, capital, and art, wishing to crack open the distance between them, in a sense his performances can be said to be trying to exorcise perception and excitability, and give form to the inexplicable and enter into their true identity, similarly creating gaps and a superfluous performance. This constitutes a singular ideological construction and form with no need to rely on “other” explanations that constitute it. This method is not only a reassessment or questioning of Relational Aesthetics including Anselm Franke’s Animism but also of Wang Jianwei’s own past practice. Because for him, all relativist practice ultimately enters into a besieged subjectivism and eclecticism. Therefore, this in turn becomes a new historical node of his artistic practice, whose constructed theatrical forms and political time would continue into his later work Time Temple.
[31][32]

The whole exhibition structure and form seems to me like a fusion between “Yellow Signal” and “… the event matured, accomplished in sight of all non-existent human outcomes”, which is to say the convergence of two different productive periods. “Time Temple” was also partitioned into individual units in accordance with theatrical patterns. Dissimilarly here, Wang Jianwei does not emphasize the “circumstantial” correlations between the units, and projects the extent of his commonly possessed theatricality and formalism. The live performance Spiraling Museum and the video work Morning Destroyed by Time still prolong the patterns of his previous practice, only here, the performance is based on the museum exhibition space itself together with the viewers and within the commissioned project’s multi-element creation, with the video work using real experience as a base, describing the encounters and ignorance of a young migrant worker in Beijing as its main subject reflecting the focus of his earlier works Living Elsewhere and Hostage. But evidently Wang Jianwei even more deeply emphasizes the sense of disharmony between the performance and the physical space, emphasizes the formalistic gaps between the video narrative and real experience. Comparatively speaking, the change in his installations is the most apparent. Though formally they would seem to cover very similar ground as aspects of Yellow Signal, for the material is not only old furniture but also uses MDF, which is to say that here the material not only bears the relevant social implications of the original’s capabilities and attributes, but thoroughly transforms it into a pure material. Therefore any inherent contradictions and struggles in the feeling of balance in the original no longer exist, thus becoming a three-dimensional construction lacking visual perception. Apart from the MDF, he also used latex, and sheet iron etc. as well as the localized application of paint. This way of dealing with material is in accordance with the same principles, it is all within a manufacturing context, and it cannot be said it is in a context of vacuity; it can even possibly be said that the meaning of everything is thoroughly disrupted. The super-positioning, cutting, folding, extrusion, assemblage and other forms of perceptivity only then protrude and become visible, thus superseding the feeling of balance in the original.
[33]

It still needs to be mentioned that although framed paintings were shown on the site of “Yellow Signal”, for me these paintings fulfill a purpose as theater props more than as paintings. Now, at this stage with painting occupying an important position, it is seemingly even more complacent. As Wang Jianwei himself has said, after twenty years he ended up picking up the paintbrush again. But the paintings do not derive from either the installation or performance, but constitute an element of theater and rehearsal. The motif on the canvas does stem from performance and video, and in its form (including its construction, brushstrokes, color relation etc.) does not lack commonality with installation. In the process of painting, he limitedly discarded the historical concepts and orders of paintings, and approached it as a form of rehearsal, with each painterly element in the role of an actor, repeatedly revealing concepts from video and rehearsal on the surface of the triptych. Whether in the segmentation of the picture frame or in the mechanical rigidity on the canvas, the distance is unequal, but they all embody a continuous interruption or rehearsal gap. It is static and in movement; it is continuous and interrupted. At this moment though, I focus more upon that since I believe that painting constitutes an independent theater, with the painting become theater from a historical perspective, how are we supposed to view and define Wang Jianwei’s practice?

In fact, since the Renaissance, the theatricalization of painting including the mutual influence of painting on theater and vice versa is a well-known reality in art history. In the mid-20th Century, Michael Fried in Art and Objecthood, saw theatricality in art as evidence for degeneration. Fried aimed his arguments against minimalism and his goal was to defend Greenberg’s Formalism. If Formalism depends on a highly formed principle, then Fried’s refection of theater is precisely the form of this principle.  Even to the extent that post-Formalism and minimalism clearly did not result in “chaos”, but instead constructed a solid rational order. In comparison, Wang Jianwei seeks greater complexity, on the one hand utilizing the visual language of painting to create theater, and on the other appealing to an absolute form. Hence a nervous detente is formed between formalism and theatricality, but for Wang Jianwei its identity is not characterized by struggle, but is instead all the gaps which can be possibly constructed by conflict. Here, the so-called “cross-media” no longer creates problems, whether in performance and video or installation and painting, they do not commonly share the form of rehearsal, but aim to create an un-nameable “new order” freed from the baggage of history and reality, even to the extent that the collisions between the different media in themselves lead to an overflow of rehearsals and gaps. The importance lies in the fact that they do not control any defined state, but are jointly aimed towards abolishing the temporal dimensions of class, status, gender, ethnicity, and social attributes which are common to all people.
[34]

Badiou said that time is a construct; moreover it is a political construct. For Wang Jianwei, the overflow of rehearsal and time here is the result of disorder. It is founded in experience whilst being unrelated to and detached from experience, and disregarding experience. These are Wang Jianwei’s thoughts and understanding of time and politics. In truth the naming of “Time Temple” alone is already very ingenious in projecting this implication. “Temple” is a space inhabited by Buddhist philosophy, it moreover acts as a spatial and temporal concept, and it is a way of measuring an existence completely different from our own. This is to say that it is a temporality which transgresses and transcends the temporal system of our daily lives. It is like what Giorgio Agamben said, that the true contemporary is an individualistic relationship between the self and one’s era, it leeches on to time whilst maintaining a tacit distance from it. More precisely, it is a relationship which attaches itself on to a specific time by means of severance and anachronisms. Those people who seem excessively identical to their era, those people whose each and every aspect perfectly corresponds to the era are not contemporary; this is precisely because they are unable to witness the era for themselves; they are incapable of contemplating their personal identity against that of time.
[35][36][37]

These excess un-nameable forms obviously cannot provide us with any concrete answers, and Wang Jianwei is constantly vigilant in questioning any legitimacy in the foundations of construction, attempting to direct towards a new time or a new contemporary. At this time he no longer emphasizes the relationships of his works, to the extent that he constantly reasserts his comprehensive or multi-faceted  (not limited to a political form or ideology) identity as an artist.  This undoubtedly places him face-to-face with the provocations of an ideological discourse, but he does not wish to rebuild a new system of domination, for he does not acknowledge any order of power. Rather, Wang Jianwei intends to provide a new heterogeneous individual, which does not belong to one world, or two worlds, but whose prerequisite for existence is a world of “multiples”. Therefore, individual here is not a specialized label, but an elemental, universal and complex artistic and political subject.
[38]

The belief in artistic systems is something Wang Jianwei calls into question, the question laying in his inability to break away from this structure and have no choice but to attach oneself to galleries, museums and biennials in the obstinate academic-capitalist framework. Wang Jianwei has by no means avoided this reality, and by calling it into question is by no means aloof or blind in his criticisms of the system, but is choosing the possibility of creating gaps in the interior structure. The artistic system, alongside his own artistic practice and materials is the object of questioning. Although he has no way of completely distancing himself from this structure, he all along has maintained a certain distance and does not wish to find a way of compromise. This means that he verily wishes to form cracks and gaps within the interior structure and politics of this system. It is the same with time, it constitutes the order of our lives, an order which we can admittedly doubt, but an order from which it is impossible to extract oneself from and stand outside of, one the contrary it is precisely from standing within the system that it is possible to create crevices or even create a new form of time.

Afterword.

It is within the context of globalization that China was able to spill over into the capitalist and socialist, autonomously and collectively dominated dualistic world, constituting an, until now, still indefinable new political form. Cold War logic, and post-Cold War thinking, all have no means of describing contemporary China and the world. IN other words, all that we encounter today is an exceedingly complicated China in an exceedingly complicated world, with our existing experience and knowledge powerless to reply to this new reality. However, against this backdrop, the meaning of Wang Jianwei’s work undoubtedly becomes all the more apparent.

In the past twenty years or so, Wang Jianwei has all along remained vigilant in the face of all those definitions under siege by historical, realist and intellectual forms. It could be said that what we call science, form, and universality are all objectified realities of the subjective structure of “Rehearsal – Time”. Wang Jianwei sees this as potentiality, such as that encountered with “Yellow Signal”, which is a temporary termination or non-choice implying the possibility of simultaneous action and inaction. But by utilizing this form of fragmented autonomy, it provides us a complete understanding towards the material, the contemporary, and the future, including the inherent risks and testing mechanisms of time.
[39]

Although in no way acknowledges that his practice follows a linear thread, more often than not, he finds himself returning to the past, but is also constantly advancing forward, in the process at all times maintaining vigilance against the current. However, in order to convenience understanding, we will not hinder a brief summary of what can be seen as three ‘different’ stages: 1. Science (Knowledge), grey areas, questioning (from the late 1980s until the end of the 1990s); 2. Theater–Rehearsal–Intervals (Potentiality) (From 200 until 2012); 3. Time–Form–Universality (from 2013 until present). Wang Jianwei most basic evaluation of his last thirty years of work is that of fashioning and finding the form of politics through science, and regardless of whether science or form, it is itself but a means of directing universality into politics.  It goes without saying that in his actual practice there is no mechanized distinction or definition; more often it embodies itself in the crossovers and overlaps between each other.

This systematic practice and cognitive mechanism points out to us that there is fundamentally no aspect of self-contained art history, for Wang Jianwei, art history is just one of any number of potential epistemological communities. Therefore, it cannot be said that Wang Jianwei uses art history as a starting point for reference or experimentation, and also does not accept the influence or interference of existing artistic systems, however, this does not mean he has completely extricated himself from art history. We possibly have no way to implant it within the existing art historical framework, but it cannot be denied that certain artworks, artists, or schools in art history have at times provoked or stimulated Wang Jianwei’s artistic production, for example Duchamp. In his own recollection, it was in the early 1980s when Wang Jianwei was working at the Chengdu School of Painting that he first saw a catalogue of Duchamp’s works and was fascinated by it, though perhaps his feeling and understanding of it at that time was not very clear. Looking back today, though the medium is admittedly different, aren’t the multi-temporal encounters and layering, the scientificity of Duchamp’s metaphors, sense of form and universality precisely the subject of Wang Jianwei’s work?! As discussed by Aby Warburg in his Anachronic Theory art is admittedly a product of a specific time, but it can transcend the past, present, and future. Thus mentioning the inspiration Wang Jianwei found in Duchamp by no means is to say that Duchamp at the end of the 19th Century already possessed and followed the same mode of thinking as Wang Jianwei does now. This would be the same as mentioning Velazquez and Monet, isolating space and time does not impede such connections in art, if we say that there is a visible connection between the two of them, then between Duchamp and Wang Jianwei, all that can be said is that this link between them has become invisible.
[40][41]

[1] Aristotle, Wuli Xue (Physics), trans. Zhang Zhuming, Beijing, Commercial Press, 1982, pp. 190-194.
[2] Members included Chen Shaoping, Gu Dexin and Wang Luyan
[3] Members included Xu Tan, Lin Yilin, Chen Shaoxiong and Liang Juhui
[4] Wang Jianwei, Time Temple, New York, Guggenheim Museum, 2014, p.54.
[5] Wang Jianwei, Time Temple, New York, Guggenheim Museum, 2014, p.54
[6] See Xu Jilin ed. Qimeng de Ziwo Wajie: 1990 niandai yilai Zhongguo Sixiang Wenhuajie Zhongda lunzheng Yanjiu, Changchun, Jilin Publishing Group, 2008.
[7] 此时，如果再看他80年代的写实绘画——1984年他的油画作品《亲爱的妈妈》还曾获得第6届全国美展金奖，到90年代初的装置实验，当更多艺术家还在标榜反体制或反官方的姿态时，汪建伟则直接去体制化了。
[8] Jerome Sans, China Talks: Interviews with 32 Contemporary Artists, p.91
[9] Bruno Latour’s Collected Works, trans. Feifei Deng, unpublished, 2015, p.5.
[10] See Deng Julong, Huise Xitong Kongzhi, Wuhan, China Central University of Science and Technology Press, 1985.
[11] See Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer, Leviathan and the Air-Pump: Hobbes, Boyle, and the Experimental Life, trans. Cai Peijun, Taipei Xingren Press, 2006.
[12] From Dushu Magazine, “Gaige: Fansi yu Tuijin”, Beijing, SUP Bookstore, 2007, pp.3-188.
[13] Hou Hanru, Zai zhongjian Didai, p.21.
[14] Jerome Sans, China Talks: Interviews with 32 Contemporary Artists, p.91
[15] See Wang Jianwei “Xin Jiagou – Guanyu zonghe Yiyi de “Shiyan Renshi” Fazhan JIangou” taken from Hou Hanru Zai Zhongjian Didai, p.12.
[16] On Aesthetics, first published in French in 1995. See Borriauld On Aesthetics, trans. Huang Jianhong, Beijing, Gold Wall Press, 2013, pp.6-7
[17] Jerome Sans, China Talks: Interviews with 32 Contemporary Artists, p.91
[18]
[19] See “Fu Xiang: Zuowei yizhong Juchang Zhengzhi” in Fu Xiang de Youling, Shanghai Yu Heng Art Center, 2015.
[20] Wu Hung, Chongbing: Zhongguo Huihua zhong de Meicai yu Zaixian, trans. Wen Dan, ed. Huang Xiaofeng, Shanghai Shanghai People’s Press, 2009, p.45.
[21] Wang Jianwei, Time Temple, New York, Guggenheim Museum, 2014, p.107
[22] Gao Shiming, “Shijian si: Yi tiao Zhixian shang de Migong”, see Time Temple, p.104
[23] Jerome Sans, China Talks: Interviews with 32 Contemporary Artists, p.92
[24] See Claire Bishop “Artificial Hells: Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship”, trans. Lin Hongtao, Taipei, Diancang Press, 2015
[25] Taken from Gao Shiming, Xingdong de Shu: Guanyu Cezhan Xiezuo, Beijing, Gold Wall Press, 2013, pp.317-318.
[26] Wang Jianwei “On Yellow Signal”, in Ullens Center of Contemporary Art Wang Jianwei: Yellow Signal, Shanghai, Shanghai People’s Press, 2012, p.6.
[27] Jacques Ranciere, The Politics of Aesthetics, New York：Continuum Press, 2008, p.90.
[28] See Claire Bishop “Artificial Hells: Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship”, p.55
[29] Wang Jianwei, Time Temple, p.107
[30] Wang Jianwei, Time Temple, p.107
[31] Borriaud, Guanyu Meixue, pp. 131.132.
[32] Wang Jianwei, Time Temple, p.108
[33] Here, whether it constitutes the means or the form, there is in no way a lack of realistic metaphors. In a sense, this is an epitome of contemporary China.
[34] Michel Foucault , Yishu yu Wuxing: Lunwen yu Pinglun ji, trans. Zhang Xiaojian and Shen Yubing, Nanjing: Jiangsu Fine Art Press, 2013, pp.155-178.
[35] Alain Badiou, Shiji (orig. Le Siècle), trans. Lan Jiang, Nanjing: Jiangsu Fine Art Press, 2011, p.116.
[36] For further reading on the nature of Buddhist time, see “Fojiao li de Shijian”, from Baidu Wenku: http://wenku.baidu.com/link?url=fwZBEWOCNEAgB7ZmAHQmskdX1mmfl3uK3G1i9Mq1CzBO0p2RLNBDsPDZOOKzXwY85aJZoz1is4JPzQ3ZJI8MMhL4ecF76roH_p1YqF38m5S.
[37] What needs to be reiterated here is that Wang Jianwei’s practice unintentionally constitutes Agamben’s theories on Materialisation and visualisation, also he unintentionally uses Agamben’s theories as an explanation for his own work. According to him, his artistic practice is first and foremost a contemplation of time, in the same vein Agamben’s theories on the Contemporary are in themselves a sort of contemporary artistic practice. Agamben Shenme shi Dangdairen (orig. Che cos’è il contemporaneo?) trans. Bai Qing, see http://www.douban.com/note/153131392/.

[38] See Alain Badiou, Shiji, p.43
[39] Wang Jianwei, Time Temple, p.108
[40] See ” Alexander Nagel and Christopher S. Wood, Anachronic Renaissance, New York: Zone Books, 2010, Daniel Arasse 错时论”Fortune and Misfortune
[41] See Svetlana Alpers，The Vexations of Art：Velazquez and Others，New Haven and Lodon：Yale University Press，2007，p.238.