The China Project

129 Three Decades: The Contemporary Chinese Collection WANG Jin Wang Jin’s Ice 96 Central China 1996 was an installation documented by him in photographs and staged in a public square outside a major new department store — the new building replacing an older one, destroyed by fire — in Zhengzhou, Henan Province in central China. For the opening celebrations, Wang Jin was commissioned to make a sculpture in front of the store. He created a wall of 600 blocks of ice — evocative of China’s Great Wall — that was 30 metres long and two metres high. Within each block was a consumer item, ranging from toys, mobile phones, wristwatches and fire extinguishers to lipstick, jewellery and perfume, and also disposable hypodermic needles and pension certificates. Wang Jin also froze photographs of the old department store and its destruction, reflecting the fate of a number of ancient buildings and monuments all over China during this period. Ice 96 Central China occurred in an old industrial centre of Zhengzhou City — which, by the mid 1990s, was experiencing the boom conditions occurring in many Chinese cities as a result of the new consumer economy — and at a time of highly competitive commercial promotions. On the store’s opening day, a crowd of approximately 10 000 people thronged around the wall before attacking it with makeshift tools to extract the goods from their glacial prison. As art historian Wu Hung writes, . . . the wall contained the objects and had turned them into sheer images. . . The only way to possess the objects — to transform them back from images to material things — would be to destroy the wall. 1 Wang Jin had not planned for the ice wall’s destruction: the reaction of the crowd was completely unexpected, but his photographs recorded the entire event. Wang Jin’s use of a translucent medium would continue in his 1996–97 series ‘A Chinese Dream’, in which he recreated traditional Peking Opera costumes in translucent plastic, illustrating his perception of Chinese culture: ‘By making the costumes translucent, [Wang] is able to define this culture as both there and not there . . . They copy traditional drama costumes but actually make the models disappear’. 2 The translucency of the ice in Ice 96 Central China both concealed and revealed the goods within, causing a new kind of interaction between audience and art work; an immediate relationship provoking thought and judgment about the choices we make as consumers and individuals. As Wu Hung observes, [r]arely do we find such a situation, in which a massive installation attracts viewers to come so close to it, to the extent that they press their faces to the surface of the object. . . [W]hen they walked into the square they first saw the wall of ice and were amazed by its scale and appearance. When they came near, however, the translucent wall gradually disappeared . . . their eyes fixed on the commercial goods suspending in the ice blocks, which drew them closer and closer. 3 Ice 96 Central China responds to the changes within Chinese culture and society during this time, particularly the emergence of a Westernised consumer society and the transformation of urban and social space. Simultaneously, Wang Jin’s installation, whose existence inspired such behaviour from the crowd, also draws attention to the idea that luxury consumer items cater to, and immobilise, human desire — the nature of which is such that it can never be fulfilled, even once the desired object is possessed. endnotes 1 Wu Hung, Transience: Chinese Experimental Art at the End of the Twentieth Century [exhibition catalogue], David and Alfred Smart Museum of Art, University of Chicago, Chicago, 1999, p.159. 2 Wu Hung, p.157. 3 Wu Hung, p.159. above Ice 96 Central China (detail) 1996, printed 2005 opposite Ice 96 Central China (details) 1996, printed 2005 Black and white photographs, ed. 3/5 / 4 sheets: 165.1 x 109.2cm (each, approx.); 3 sheets: 109.2 x 165.1cm (each, approx.) / Purchased 2007. The Queensland Government’s Gallery of Modern Art Acquisitions Fund