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

Paradoxical 'Bicycles' Lives and works in Beijing, China 74 I ART I s T s • EA s T A s I A Bicycle (3) 1995 Installation comprising re-formed bicycles and drawing shown at Japan Foundation Forum,Tokyo Wang Luyan has always been interested in creating paradoxical images similar to those of the painter M. C. Escher. While Escher is adept at exploiting perspective-derived illusion, Wang Luyan devotes himself to the creation of mechanical installations that have the potential of action. Since the time of Duchamp's Large glass: The bride stripped bare by her bachelors, even, various attempts have been made to construct movable mechanical installations. Most of these attempts have been fun– seeking exercises and none, including Duchamp's efforts, have succeeded in creating mechanically manoeuverable installations that are both conceptually paradoxical and artistically original. This is perhaps why Duchamp's work The bride stripped bare ... was never realised. Wang's work has focused on bridging this gap. Starting in the 1980s, Wang made a number of models and drawings of mechanical installations with paradoxical connotations: saws that sawed each other, and mutually empowering power sources. Sketches of some of the saw installations were featured in the contemporary Chinese art exhibition held in the Museum of Modern Art, Oxford, in 1993. (But these were only models and drawings of immovable objects.) In 1995Wang Luyan succeeded in re-forming several bicycles so that they moved backwards in response to normal pedalling.These bicycles made their debut in August the same year at the 'New Asian Art Show: Now a Dream of East', Tokyo and attracted much attention. Many people tried to ride the bicycles, but none could move them forward. This was because conventional wisdom did not apply to these bicycles, a fact that people had difficulty coming to terms with. Some visitors to the exhibition said that the work reflected a kind of Oriental wisdom while others saw it as a satire on contemporary Chinese society. Its most direct appeal, however, lies in the philosophical message embodied in the 'game-like' activity which is associated with the baffling experience of finding one's conventional wisdom ineffective. What comes across as the winning feature of this work is its ability to integrate the light-hearted with the serious, fun and games with real life experience, mechanics at the physical level with philosophy at the meta– physical level, and the most ordinary (bicycles) with the most extraordinary (these particular bicycles). Li Xianting, Art Critic and Lecturer, Beijing, China