The Second Asia-Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art exhibition catalogue (APT2)

WANG Guang Yi Lives and works in Wuhan, China Narcotics 1995 Installation comprising photograph, fake fur,wooden box 72 I ARTISTS EAST ASIA Wang Guang Yi was one of the founders of the Northern Art Group, an important group of modern Chinese artists established in the 1980s, and is a leading figure in contemporary Chinese art. His works have been featured in major national and international exhibitions including the 'Modern Chinese Art Show', Beijing, 1989; the '45th Venice Biennale', 1993; and the '22nd Sao Paulo Biennial', 1994. In the 1990s, Wang Guang Yi's oil painting series 'Great criticism' enabled him to become a leading exponent of the political pop art movement in China. This movement is believed to have brought about the transformation of China's new art from the state of 'modernism' to a contemporary mode. 'Great criticism', with its unique cultural analysis and sense of history, has thus attracted attention from academic circles both in China and abroad. In 1993, Wang Guang Yi started work on a series of installations called, respectively, Visa, East European landscape and Paradise. He regards such work as involving the 'externalisation' of art. This means that the question of language within artistic disciplines is externalised as a cultural question, and that Chinese problems are externalised to become the problems of the world. Both is_sues should be addressed in a pro-active way. In these works, the artist's exposition of issues such as national ideologies in the post-Cold War era, the geopolitical configuration of the world, and other cultural and psychological realities facing the whole of humankind clearly demonstrates such a pro-active cultural attitude. Paradise reflects on a theme that transcends state, racial and ideological boundaries. The artist places 'narcotic drugs', a socio-psychological reality that endangers the common destiny of humankind, in a critical discourse and succeeds in uncovering (in a concrete and symbolic way) some paradoxes between the religious spirit, moral code and social norms of humanity. The work employs such materials as wooden board, pictures and fake fur. As the artist himself puts it, the reason for selecting fake fur as one of the main materials is because fake fur is pleasing to touch and look at: it has an irresistible allure. Under the protection of 'fake fur', images are presented to the human eye as both intimate and evil; the material form of this sensation is as subtle as it is inscrutable.This is exactly the kind of visual and psychological affect experienced by viewers of Paradise. Huang Zhuan, Associate Professor, Guangzhou Academy of Fine Art, Guangzhou, China