11th Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art

NOTES 1 These actions were Mourning by Zhang Shengquan, Zhu Yanguang and Ren Xiaoying; Big Business by Wu Shanzhuan; and To the Sun God by Wang Deren. 2 Respectively, Prodigal Son by Wang Lang; Goodbye by Li Shan; and Hatching by Zhang Nian. 3 Wang has suggested that the ghost represents Zhang Shengquan (aka Datong Dazhang), one of the performers of Mourning , who took his own life on 1 January 2000. Wang Tuo’s The Second Interrogation 2023 is a video installation in two parts that hinges on interpretations of the era-defining exhibition ‘China/Avant-Garde’, held at Beijing’s National Museum of Art in February 1989. A wideranging survey of contemporary art in the 1980s featuring more than 180 artists, ‘China/Avant-Garde’ is most canonically remembered for designer Yang Zhilin’s iconic ‘No U-Turn’ logo and a set of unsanctioned performances that came to be known as the ‘seven sins’. Artists dressed in sheets moved through the gallery as ghosts of experimental art; sold prawns at cut prices; and tossed coins and condoms into the crowd. 1 One artist dressed as an ancient swordsman to spook unsuspecting audiences; another washed his feet in a bath over a picture of Ronald Reagan; while a third crouched in a nest of eggs, waiting futilely for them to hatch. 2 Most notoriously, artist Xiao Lu fired two gunshots into her installation Dialogue , resulting in temporary closure of the exhibition. While these actions were interpreted as comments on the institutionalisation and commercialisation of art, or the role of the individual in a changing social context, they are linked to the events that transpired several weeks later, between April and June 1989, in nearby Tiananmen Square. In the first part of The Second Interrogation , the ‘seven sins’ are revisited during a staged artist talk. The action plays across two screens, video and audio converging and diverging as they follow encounters between two characters: an artist whose practice critically appraises the history of Chinese art since 1989; and a veteran agent of ‘the system’ tasked with quietly observing art events and reporting any transgressions. The artist has become so skilled at sidestepping sensitive terms and issues that he has begun to question his own role, viewing artistic radicalism as the work of impatient intellectuals. The censor is plagued by doubt, haunted by questions that arise from the works of art he sees daily, and obsessed with a third, unfired bullet reportedly loaded into Xiao Lu’s gun. In the single-channel projection of part two of The Second Interrogation, a second artist, driven to despair after the cancellation of an exhibition, is visited by one of the ghosts of experimental art. 3 This revenant of unfulfilled revolts ruminates on tensions between the extremes of institutional discipline and individual nihilism extending back to the birth of modern China in the May Fourth Movement of 1919. The work culminates in a dynamically choreographed and filmed performance by young Chinese dancers, referencing the ‘seven sins’ of ‘China/Avant-Garde’, into which artist and censor are drawn for an unplanned firing of Xiao Lu’s third bullet. The combination of documentary and dramatic modes is typical of Wang Tuo’s cinema- influenced video practice, which draws on history, mythology and fiction to examine unresolved collective traumas. The Second Interrogation has an immediate precursor in Wang’s The Interrogation 2017, which involved a similar dynamic of ideological slippage, as a discussion about interview tips turns into a disclosure of interrogation techniques. With the four works of the Northeast Tetralogy 2018–21, Wang developed the idea of what he calls ‘pan-shamanism’, inspired by cultures around his hometown of Changchun near China’s Russian border, according to which humans are the bearers of collective suffering. In The Second Interrogation , this finds expression through the invocation of suppressed forces beneath the surface of the Earth and historical ruptures that provide glimpses of other dimensions, like aftershocks of century-old earthquakes. Equal parts spy thriller, dance piece and art-theory treatise, The Second Interrogation is a spectacularly staged consideration of censorship and self-censorship, the individual and the state, the ethics of art and the dynamics of history. REUBENKEEHAN BORN 1984, CHANGCHUN, CHINA LIVES+WORKS INBEIJING, CHINA WANGTUO The Second Interrogation (stills) 2023 / Two-channel 4K video: colour, sound, 24:30 minutes, Mandarin (English subtitles); single-channel 4K video: colour, sound, 29:26 minutes, Mandarin (English subtitles) / Co-commissioned by Blindspot Gallery, Hong Kong, and White Space, Beijing / Courtesy: The artist and Blindspot Gallery, Hong Kong ARTISTS+PROJECTS ASIAPACIFICTRIENNIAL 206 — 207