Wang Jianwei
2021零
Wang Jianwei
"HBOX" or "Hermes Box" is a work by architect Didier; the entire video work is displayed inside a box. At his exhibition, artist Wang Jiawei talked about the piece he created for this venue, "Zero" — a performance art work. In terms of visual structure, it is more like a classic painting. It is performed on a very simple stage; the way Wang chooses and handles social themes lets us think of Brecht's theater. "Zero" tells a story for everyone. At the beginning, the film shows a person jumping from a building. In the process of jumping, seven floors go by, and as the jumper passes each, he sees a scene through the window. These scenes he cannot escape. Wang said that his artistic inspiration and the social reality of his film came from recent serial suicide jumping cases in China. In one case, 12 people jumped, one after another; the oldest was 21, and the youngest 19.
Zero
生活在别处
Wang Jianwei
Along the newly constructed expressway to Chengdu's airport, there is a group of villas built in the beginning of the nineties and left uncompleted for almost seven years. In this marginal area between the city and the country, four peasant families from different parts of China live under primitive conditions as squatters, growing some vegetables, collecting waste metals, and sewing clothes. Unable to return to their homes after losing land in a bubble economy, they decided to migrate and seek a new beginning.
Living Elsewhere
The Morning Time Disappeared
Wang Jianwei
Inspired by Franz Kafka's novella The Metamorphosis (1915), Wang has subjected the classic Western story to multiple transpositions: from the early twentieth to the early twenty-first century, from Jewish Prague to China, as well as a formal transposition from novella to film.
The Morning Time Disappeared
生产
Wang Jianwei
A series of images of Sichuan teahouses shot with a handy camcorder by a young artist whose installations and paintings have been representative of Chinese contemporary art in exhibits around the world. The filmmaker explores emerging forms and space in the context of understanding a mechanism of information transmission, a theme that is also apparent in his installation works.
Production
