Symptom is the latest large stage work by Wang Jianwei, it discussing art issue such as art producing, social background and mentality-body through an allegorical context. This art work uses different media such as video, photo, theater, sculpture and performance, trying to show today’s Chinese with intricate states of culture, society, mentality, body, ethic and space. By this intersected and nonlinearized way, Wang Jianwei finds out something potential behind the convention, it indicates Wang Jianwei’s intelligent system is tightly related to the human idealistic logic and the social structure. No matter video, installation, photo, or theater, conceptual text, they all represent the rational aspect of Wang Jianwei’s art conception.
The term “symptom” originally comes from iatrical field. Doctors diagnose disease according to the patient’s different symptoms. In this work Symptom, Wang Jianwei transfers this term into an art concept and expressing a kind of uncertainty. Inside the context of uncertainty, some of the intersections and combinations may induce the holistic relationship. Even as Wang Jianwei ever said that symptom is relation. This large stage work is the representation of Wang Jianwei forming his consideration and expression in the relations between different media and different synthetical cognition.

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