Dissatisfied with what he sees as the closed system of contemporary art, wherein works are understood through vision and words only, Wang Jianwei produces deliberately unclassifiable, ambiguous work, through which he aims to reflect the fullness of the world. “I think what I’m doing is presenting the world as I see it . . . as a place where many different things—opposite things—are juxtaposed,” he says. Since 2000, Wang has combined a multitude of media, including performance, sculpture, and video, to create installations meant to be experienced as expressions of ideas and questions—about art, society, history—rather than as fixed, concrete objects. In Yellow Signal (2011), for example, he filled Beijing’s Ullens Center for Contemporary Art with an immersive installation of video projections with voyeuristic, semi-abstract narratives.
Chinese, b. 1958, Sichuan Province, China, based in Beijing, China