Background
Jianwei Wang was born on October 28, 1958 in Shuining, China. He lived in a traditional military family till 1966. Both of his parents were soldiers, and he spent his childhood in military camps, also known as budui dayuan.
(In 2014, Wang Jianwei presented Wang Jianwei: Time Temple...)
In 2014, Wang Jianwei presented Wang Jianwei: Time Temple, the first of three commissions of The Robert H. N. Ho Family Foundation Chinese Art Initiative at the Guggenheim Museum. This exhibition examines the contact between art and social reality. His highly innovative artworks consider space and time in elaborate ways: working from the notion that the production of artwork can be a continuous rehearsal, connecting theater, visual art, and film. Wang Jianwei: Time Temple is the artist's first solo exhibition in North America. This exhibition comprises installation, painting, film, and a live theater production.
2014
汪建伟
Jianwei Wang was born on October 28, 1958 in Shuining, China. He lived in a traditional military family till 1966. Both of his parents were soldiers, and he spent his childhood in military camps, also known as budui dayuan.
After graduating from high school in 1975, Jianwei Wang relocated to the countryside. During his free time, Wang went into town to privately study painting with a stage designer, who worked for a local Sichuan opera company. Through government-banned books, he acquainted himself with Russian literature and painting. During this time, he also began learning to paint in realist style.
After two years of reeducation, Jianwei Wangwas conscripted to join the People's Liberation Army in 1977, when he served as a military engineer and operations specialist in a barrack in Qinghe County, Hebei Province, south of Beijing. He didn't produce any art during his military service.
In 1983, the military assigned Wang Jianwei work as a store manager at the Chengdu Painting Institute, Chengdu Huayuan. During this time, he gained access to a variety of Western art styles from the Institute and the city, when he created a series of pen drawings and sketches of patrons at a local teahouse. These drawings then became the basis for the group painting series known as the Tea House series (1980-1990). During this time, he painted Dear Mother (1983), a work that renewed the academic realist style of the Sichuan Painting School. Dear Mother won the Gold Award in its category at the Sixth National Fine Arts Exhibition at the National Art Gallery (now National Art Museum of China) in 1984.
In 1984, Jianwei Wang met his future teacher Zheng Shengtian, who had just returned to China from the United States and brought along many materials that referenced Western contemporary art. This was the first time that Wang saw documentations of installation and environmental art, which cast a profound impact on his later style. The "85 New Wave Art Movement" ("85 Xinchao meishu yundong") between 1985 and 1989 was a nationwide avant-garde movement that was stimulated by increasing contact and exchange with the contemporary international art world. In 1985, the National Art Gallery hosted the Rauschenberg Overseas Culture Interchange project, which introduced Jianwei Wang to the work of Robert Rauschenberg.
Jianwei Wang enrolled in a graduate program for oil painting at the Zhejiang Academy of Fine Arts, now China Academy of Art, in Hangzhou, Zhejiang Province; he graduated in 1987. In 1990, he met and acquainted with the Beijing-based art group called the New Measurement Group (Xin kedu). The group shared many of Wang's perspectives in conceptual and experimental art practices and art making.
After graduating from the Zhejiang Academy of Fine Arts, Wang produced his Tea House series (1989-1990). The Tea House series was shown in a solo exhibition at the Cultural Palace of Nationalities in Beijing in 1991.
In 1992, he became interested in the "grey system," also known as "grey relational analysis". Jianwei Wang created his first elaborate conceptual installation work, Document (1992), at his house. A year later, Wang also created Incident-Process, State (1993), an installation including video, text, and sculpture at the Hong Kong Arts Centre, inspired by the grey system. Jianwei Wang returned to the village where he received reeducation, and collaborated with a local farmer to stage a performance Circulation-Sowing and Harvesting (1993-1994).
Jianwei Wang produced Paravent (2000), a nonlinear narrative theater performance and video about rethinking history exhibited at nl:Kunstenfestivaldesarts in Brussels and at the Brighton Fringe in Brighton, UK. This is his first multimedia performance work, and first work featuring actors.
Jianwei Wang was artist-in-residence at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, MN in 2003, when he presented the performance and multimedia installation Movable Taste. In 2004, he attended the fr:Festival d'Automne à Paris, during which he presented Ceremony (2003), a large-scale multimedia work that included theater, performance and new media, at the Centre Georges Pompidou.
Wang's project Welcome to the Desert of the Real (2010), organized by Culturescapes, Basel, employs performance, animation, theater production for film, and a five-channel video component.
During the last two decades, he also met many globally established artists, curators, collectors and influential people, including Catherine David, curator for Documenta X in 1997, and Hou Hanru, a curator at Wiener Secession in Vienna, now the Consulting Curator of the Robert H. N. Ho Family Foundation Chinese Art Initiative at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York.
In 1983, Jianwei Wang met Zhu Guangyan, an army nurse just before he was discharged. Less than a year later, they got married. Wang and Zhu lived apart for nearly seven years due to the strict government policies on residency locations, known as the hukou household registration system. Zhu was registered in Beijing, while Jianwei Wang was tied to his parents back in Chengdu, Sichuan Province.