WANG Tuo, Obsessions, 2019, single channel 4K video, © White Space Beijing, 29 April 2020 – 29 April 2021
Standing at the Crossroads is the second solo exhibition that goes online by artist Wang Tuo at White Space Beijing, which includes five video works that Wang Tuo has completed over the last two years.
Focusing on the continuous examination of the unreliable relationship between contemporary human status, myth and cultural archive, the artist often starts from behavior, directing the actions of the actors in his images, and guiding us through the intertwined clues of reality and falsehood to conduct an almost diagnostic observation experiment on character behavior and narrative.
Like the 2 videos Smoke and Fire and Distorting Words which are both from Tuo’s new project in the Northeast of China, we can clearly tell the parallel narratives of the individual stories. The former portrays the image of a migrant worker who exists simultaneously in both worlds of a two-part intertwined reality. In one world, he found sagas and legends from antiquity to the 20th century in the warehouse of a cinema, and read them while improvising their plot. In another world, the artist narrates his daily life about returning home from work but slowly escalates into a long-prepared and ceremonial act of violence. As a sequel, Distorting Words is a three-channel film which depicts the overlaps of two deaths, one happened during the New Democracy Movement in 1919 and another occurred during a protest in 2019. Without connotation abound to specific belief, Tuo’s neologism suggests that there is historical reincarnation of our situations, which makes actual bodies become mediums that sync us to different times and spaces.
The same kind of creative approach can be found in the video Symptomatic Silence of Complicit Forgetting, where one space shows a writer who passed away still lingers around his wife as a ghost, trying to heal the wounds in their memories but to no avail, and in another scenario a young red guard mistakenly enters a room piled with books but stepped out quickly due to the parade outside. This traumatic memory from a half-century ago has again come undone.
Beyond that, the behavior is not just about the physical body according to Tuo. He treats the behavior more like an action, a process of manipulation. Thus, the object and material it deals with can also be an archive, an event or a memory. The work Obsessions reveals the process in which an architect is gradually hypnotized by a therapist, who tries to make his patient imagine himself as a piece of architecture. The video records thoroughly inside the Fusuijing Building, a structure built in the 1950s but lies half-abandoned today. Here, the artist attempts to use the spatial structure to imitate the structure of our subconscious, which is oftentimes obscure and indiscernible. Also, in the three-channel video Spiral, the artist demonstrates the juxtaposition of the scratch-to-construction practice in architecture with the concept of the dimensional wall in the otaku culture, and discusses how human desires formed in the 2D world are amplified, consumed and deepened in the real world.
Bibliography
[1] https://www.artforum.com/interviews/wang-tuo-on-the-emotional-architectures-of-his-video-works-83078/