reviews WANG DU
Post Réalité, 2007 (installation view). courtesy the artist and Arndt & Partner, Berlin & Zurich
wAng Du: Post reAlite
ArNDt & PArtNer, BerliN
2 OctOBer – 24 NOvemBer
Wang Du was born in China in 1956, where he studied at the Canton Wang Du himself describes it, as evidence of the ways in which information
Academy of the Fine Arts. He began his career in the 1980s as a performance has come to occupy the same place in our day-to-day lives as rumour,
artist, and since 1990 he has lived and worked in Paris. His exhibition at having achieved the status of a living organism and such all-pervasiveness
Berlin’s Arndt & Partner runs concurrently with another, Transréalité, at the that ‘the media are the air, blood, nearly everything we have lived’. If you
Kestner Gesellschaft, Hannover. The four works on show in Berlin (all works were to read the catalogue for Post Réalité (and it’s really advisable not to,
2007) consist exclusively of massive bronze sculptures mimicking the form unless gibberish is your thing) you could probably be just about forgiven for
of crumpled pages of discarded newspaper print, each partially illustrative thinking that Wang Du was unusual in having arrived at such a conclusion.
of the artist’s abiding interest in contemporary mass-media’s continual Beyond that, once you’ve taken a second to work out what’s going on and
(mis)representation of the world and world events as instantly disposable what it’s supposed to mean and why it’s clever (it’s not), there’s not much
moments in an increasingly fictitious narrative. doing.
You can’t help but be immediately impressed by what’s on show. What’s perhaps most interesting about this show, and Wang Du’s
They’re nice big lumps of metal, the texts to which their titles refer etched practice more generally, is the way it intersects between the cultural politics
tantalisingly, only partially legibly, across their gleaming, many-folded of the Western international artworld, not least its growing interest in
surfaces. Their installation is itself pretty remarkable, each contorted hulk Chinese art, and his own status as a Chinese artist working in the West,
appearing to hover above a photographic representation of what, if you reflecting upon how information is communicated and functions in the
tried to imagine it, the information superhighway might look like from mixed economy of the country of his birth, while simultaneously finding
above. Wang Du is also good at giving lasting, imposing form to discarded parallels with the global media’s representation of China abroad. One gets
items and the stories they fleetingly tell. Respectively entitled China Daily – the feeling it would have been much better to see these works in conjunction
IMF Chief Confident on China, Services Top Task for Games, Top 10 Profiles with some other examples of his diverse range of practice – which is, of
of the Urban Male and 2006–2007 Directory of Investment in, they stand, as course, exactly what you can do if you go to Hannover. Luke Heighton
141 Artreview
December_REVIEWS.indd 141 2/11/07 12:19:22
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