The Night Revels: Wang Qingsong in Conversation with Danielle Shang

Danielle Shang: I have seen many versions of your biography; they are all slightly different. I want for once to get the correct information from you.

Wang Qingsong: I was born in in 1966. My family moved to province when my father was transferred to an oil field there in 1969. After he passed away in 1980, I replaced him to work on a drilling platform. In 1990, I went to to attend preparation classes for the art academy. I was admitted by Sichuan Art Academy the following year and graduated with an associate degree in oil in 1993, and I immediately moved to .

Danielle Shang: When you worked in the oil field, how did you hear about Western contemporary art and the Chinese avant-garde art movement?

Wang Qingsong: Hubei was very progressive in the mid 1980s. Many young artists from Hubei participated in the ’85 New Wave Movement.1 I learned about contemporary art from my friends. There were three important art publications at the time that also spread the news: Fine Arts, Jiangsu Art Journal, and Art Newspaper.2

Danielle Shang: In most of your work, you illustrate the diligent pursuit of personal dreams and the uncertain outlook about the future in the big cities of against the background of globalization and modernization. How was your experience of pursuing your own personal dreams? What were your dreams when you came to Beijing? You said that you considered yourself a “loser.” Why?

Wang Qingsong: I took my father’s place on the drilling platform. Even though I enjoyed drilling, I was very aware that the job had a low social status. People looked down upon those who worked in the oil fields. I was not good at schooling either. I took the admission exams for the art school five times before I was finally accepted. It seemed I had failed so many times in my life before I moved to Beijing. After I graduated, I couldn’t even go back to the oil field to work in a more decent department. When I came to Beijing, my dream was to eventually enter a national exhibition.

Danielle Shang: You were part of the Gaudy Art movement in the mid 1990s. Why were you interested in that style?

Wang Qingsong: Gaudy Art was inspired by pop culture. I was fascinated with pop culture at that time. I realized that our tradition needed to be

Vol. 10 No. 5 51 Wang Qingsong, Competition, 1995, oil on canvas, 200 x 175 cm. Courtesy of the artist.

synchronized with our contemporary life. Gaudy Art was an attempt to digest what was happening. But the other reason was that in the 90s, Political Pop and Cynical Realism were already very popular. , , and had a fast and stellar rise. In 1993 and 1994, Fang Lijun was invited to participate in the Venice Biennale and São Paulo Biennale. It was not cool to be a follower. I saw no hope for imitating their styles. I actually wanted to quit painting all together.

Danielle Shang: While living in the artist village Yuanmingyuan, you hung out with many artists who were also known as Gaudy Artists, such as Liu Zheng and Xu Yihui. You discussed pop culture a lot. What was pop culture like back then?

Wang Qingsong: Pop culture in China was definitely different from pop culture in the West. It started with music. Music was changing in the 90s. Many propaganda songs that once were political and serious were rearranged to become pop songs: not pop songs for the middle class or city dwellers, but folk songs for peasants and truck drivers. The conversion made it easy for ordinary people to digest “high” culture. The repackaging also achieved a commercial success. Many songs about Mao sung by girls with coy voices became instant hits.

Danielle Shang: What was it like to live in Yuanmingyuan and later in Song Zhuang?

52 Vol. 10 No. 5 Wang Qingsong: In Yuanmingyuan, it was about survival. The living conditions were primitive. Most of us were outsiders of society. Nobody had a steady income or a stable job. A few people hung out in Yuanmingyuan because they enjoyed the bohemian lifestyle. Song Zhuang was a scene of prosperity at that time. Yue Minjun, Fang Lijun, and Liu Wei had enough money to build their own studios. I didn’t have money, so I rented a place to live in Song Zhuang, and after that I was forced to move five times in 1995 and 1996.

Danielle Shang: In 1996 you stated that you were unable to continue painting and finally quit. What did you mean by that?

Wang Qingsong: I hit a dead end. If I had continued painting, I would have ended up being a copycat. I could not make painting work, and you will notice at that time other practices such as performance art, installation, and photography were beginning to appear in China. I started to experiment with photography and photo collage. You can see the cutouts I used from magazines and calendars in my images from 1996 and 1997.

Wang Qingsong, Our Life Is Sweeter than Honey, 1997, photocollage, 75 x 240 cm. Courtesy of the artist.

Wang Qingsong, Last Supper, 1997, photocollage, 75 x 240 cm. Courtesy of the artist.

Danielle Shang: Our Life Is Sweeter than Honey (1996) and Last Supper (1996) were all photo collage?

Wang Qingsong: Yes. The former was made out of the propaganda poster for ’s handover and the latter was made of a calendar: one girl from each month, plus me in the middle. Thirteen of us.

Danielle Shang: Were you aware that the Last Supper was from the Bible?

Wang Qingsong: Of course. I learned about it when I was taking art classes. Everyone was copying Western masterpieces and making sketches of Western statues: Caucasians with curly hair. All the artworks we studied were European church-related. Such is our art education system: completely borrowed from Europe. It was first introduced to China by Xu Beihong.

Vol. 10 No. 5 53 Danielle Shang: I know that Li Xianting was influential in the 1990s, and you were friends with him. When was your first solo show? Did Li Xianting have anything to do with it?

Wang Qingsong: My first solo show was at Ludovic Bois’s Chinese Contemporary Art in in 1997. It was a painting show. Li was not involved.

Danielle Shang: I want to talk about Night Revels of Lao Li (2000). Was Wang Qingsong, Night Revels of Lao Li (detail), 2000, colour there a particular reason to choose Li Xianting as the protagonist? And photograph, 120 x 960 cm. Courtesy of the artist. what is your experience in China as an intellectual? Do you think you are carrying out the responsibility for social reform and political progress? Or do you think that you are resigning yourself to the state of Han Xizai3 because you feel disappointed and powerless about China’s reality?

Wang Qingsong: I didn’t intend to involve him. He was so famous and idolized, and I was nobody. I was actually intimidated by him. Before the photo shoot, I had a conversation with Li Xianting, and when he heard about my project, his eyes lit up. He told me that he just finished an article on the destiny of Chinese literati and Night Revels of Han Xizai. He volunteered to play the role of Han Xizai for my shoot after our talk. I originally hired someone else who had a long beard and looked very much like the figure in the original painting. But Lao Li had something that nobody else had: his manner, his emotional depth, and his experience in life. He was the perfect Han Xizai. After I developed the film, I was profoundly impressed with his expression of powerlessness and stoicism; it was precious. You know, what happened to Han Xizai a thousand years ago is not different from what happens to today’s intellectuals.

Li Xianting was not acting. These were his true feelings. In 2000, when the Chinese government began to become involved with contemporary art, many renowned artists collaborated with the government. Li Xianting never verbalized his disapproval, but I could see it on his face. Once I spent the

54 Vol. 10 No. 5 night on the sofa at his home. He asked me: “Do you know who has slept on this sofa before? From Luo Zhongli to Fang Lijun to Wang Guangyi. They all have slept here. Now you.” His sofa was a metaphor for the Chinese contemporary art scene. He saw enough of coming-and-going and was skeptical about the clueless illusion of success.

Danielle Shang: You sold all your by the end of the 1990s. You don’t have any paintings left, do you?

Wang Qingsong: Technically I didn’t sell anything. Nobody bought my paintings. But I begged and put pressure on a few people to pay for my paintings because my mom was fatally ill and I needed money for the hospital bills. In 1999, I let three of my biggest paintings go for only 10,000 RMB. I raised about 20,000 RMB for my mom.

Danielle Shang: Before 2000, when you were beginning your photography, you could only afford to take pictures of yourself. How were you able to rent large film studios, hire numerous models, and build elaborate sets after 2000?

Wang Qingsong: Money was tight in the 1990s. A model would cost over 100 RMB, which someone could live on for an entire month. My mother passed away in 2000. Before her death, her working unit compensated her for some of the hospital expenses and ten month’s worth of salary. She left every penny to me. I spent it all on the production of Night Revels of Lao Li, which I began to prepare in 1998, but I kept putting it off due to the lack of money.

Danielle Shang: Because you employ sprawling studio settings and staged arrangements, you are often compared to Jeff Wall and Gregory Crewdson. I find your sensibility quite different from theirs. Their photography is sleek and polished. Many images look like still images from big-budget movies. But yours are rough, awkward, satiric, and whimsical.

Wang Qingsong: When someone first pointed this out to me, I had no idea who they were. I looked them up. For me, their photography emphasizes technique. Their work is textbook perfect. But I don’t care about technique. If we must talk about inspiration, my work is inspired by the photography of the Cultural Revolution. Most propaganda photos at that time were ridiculously staged. They made up hundreds of photos of a young soldier, Lei Feng, and they gathered crops from other farms to fill up one rice paddy field for the photo shoot of a miracle harvest under Mao’s leadership. Pictures of people reading Mao’s books in the sun are laughable. How can you see anything in the bright sun?

But I was also influenced by Pierre & Gilles. I saw a postcard of their work on the street of London. I immediately detected a similar sense of mockery and sarcasm in their work to mine. Their 1990 photo of a tearful army official from the former Soviet Union, Le Petit Communiste Christophe, was amazing: garish, erotic, and ridiculous. I later bought their books to further study their art. Their art is not exactly photography, because it involves post-production using painting and colouring. I regard them as great artists. When they came to China to exhibit in , we almost met. They

Vol. 10 No. 5 55 expressed an interest in remaking one of my photographs. I liked the idea. We exchanged emails and tried to make a plan to meet, but unfortunately it didn’t happen. It was a pity.

Danielle Shang: Not all of your photographs have grand schemes and massive studio sets. Follow Me (2003) was simple but nevertheless striking.

Wang Qingsong: People thought that my art attracted so much attention Wang Qingsong, Follow Me, 2003, colour photograph, 120 x because I spent so much money on big sets. So I deliberately minimized the 300 cm. Courtesy of the artist. production for Follow Me and gave myself a budget of 100 RMB. The only things I paid for were the boxes of chalk and the stick in my hand. The total cost was 20 RMB. I regret very much that I didn’t document the shooting. It was so messy. The floor was covered with rubbish. But after I edited the photo and cropped out the floor, it became one of my favourite works. The image was immediately embraced in the West, I think because of the English words on the chalkboard, which made relating to it easier. The Chinese audience prefers Night Revels of Lao Li.

Danielle Shang: Most of your work has to do with food and the impact of Western consumerism on Chinese culture. When was your first time eating Western food? Was it at McDonald’s or Pizza Hut?

Wang Qingsong: McDonald’s. I ate at the first McDonald’s in China. Someone treated me to a hamburger in 1994. We spent four hours there. The service was excellent. The place was enormous. A waiter brought food to our table and cleaned up after us. It was luxurious and elegant. When I had my first McDonald’s in London in 1997, I could not believe my experience: it was cheap and uncharacteristic of my previous experiences. The place was just a hole in the wall across the street from a sewage maintenance facility. Workers came in for their break, still in their dirty uniforms. I left after only a few minutes, feeling cheated. The contrast was so profound that I had to make a work about it.

Danielle Shang: Was this your first time abroad? What was your first impression of the West?

Wang Qingsong: The West, in my mind, before I first went abroad, was material driven and money thirsty. I went to London alone. I had a map

56 Vol. 10 No. 5 of London, but it was in Chinese with pictures of subways and museums. Naturally the map didn’t help. I pointed at my map to police officers on the street. They would walk with me until we reached about ten or twenty metres from the address that I was looking for. Sometimes they would walk with me as far as a kilometre. To avoid making me feel embarrassed, they always left a few metres for me to walk on my own. The officers were so nice and considerate. At first, I was intimidated, because you wouldn’t see police carrying weapons in China so I dared not to ask them for directions. But they always approached me voluntarily. I thought to myself: “My god, is it really capitalism? It’s even better than communism.”

Danielle Shang: You have made a lot of references to art history, both Western and Chinese. Do you intentionally incorporate art history into your art?

Wang Qingsong: Masterpieces are like stage props for me. They are too popular and too well received to provoke controversy. Art history functions, in my work, as a helper for composition. Masterpieces are so familiar to the viewer that they have become part of the subconscious.

Danielle Shang: In 2006, you didn’t produce any work, but you did work on an elaborate, installation-based photograph titled Blood of the World, in which you referenced many masters’ paintings, from Delacroix to Goya. Could you tell us what the work was intended to be and why the films were confiscated? Have you had a lot of problems with permits and security? What kind of impact did this incident have on you?

Wang Qingsong, production shot of Blood of the World, 2006. Courtesy of the artist.

Wang Qingsong: 2005 had so many war-related memorial events: it was the 60th anniversary of the surrender of Japan and the end of World War II in Europe. I planned to shoot a photo to commemorate those events. The production was very intense. I spent over a month in 2006 in the studio to prepare the set. It would have been the most complex shoot for me. An extra actor told the police about the nude models in the piece. It had never been a big deal for me to shoot nudity. This incident changed my perception of artists’ freedom in China. Censorship had never occurred to me until then. I realized that there were boundaries and limits in this society. To survive, I

Vol. 10 No. 5 57 Left: Wang Qingsong, Competition, 2005, colour photograph, 170 x 300 cm. Courtesy of the artist. Opposite page, top: Wang Qingsong, Debacle, 2009, colour photograph, 180 x 300 cm. Courtesy of the artist. Opposite page, middle: Wang Qingsong, Romeo and Juliet, 2009, colour photograph, 120 x 170 cm. Courtesy of the artist. Opposite page, bottom: Wang Qingsong, Safe Milk, 2009, colour photograph, 150 x 300 cm. Courtesy of the artist.

needed to put my tail between my legs; I had to be humble. I couldn’t think only about myself and my art, I had children and a family now. Censorship could also affect them.

Danielle Shang: It has been Wang Qingsong, Debacle (detail), 2009, colour photograph, 180 x fifteen years since you began using 300 cm. Courtesy of the artist. photography as your primary medium. When you look back on your career, do you think your work has changed? In 2008, you employed new media: video and . The sensibility in the work is more reflective than reactive. Even in your photography, your interest has seemed to shift to the psychoanalytical impact of changes in China. If we compare Competition (2005) with Debacle (2009), we can see the frenzied action depicted in Competition, but Debacle is quiet and without one single person in it. It presents an almost abstract pattern with an eerie feeling of defeat and desertion. How did the transformation begin?

Wang Qingsong: I wanted to revisit Competition, but I didn’t want to repeat it. In 2004, the global economy was booming. Many Western investors came to China to open factories. But in 2009, when the economy plunged, many factories in the coastal areas were shut down. The world changes so drastically and so rapidly; so do people. I often think about revisiting Night Revels, too, perhaps to make a video work.

I have changed psychologically and emotionally. Before, my attitude was very blunt and unapologetic. I don’t see things as black-and-white any more. I still question many things, however, I am no longer so direct. Soci- ety has become so complicated. And I have grown older now. I’m more cau- tious. I am now willing to consider that there are various possible answers.

Danielle Shang: The style in your newer photographs, such as Romeo and Juliet (2009) or Safe Milk (2009), is quite different from your previous work. Professional fashion models are employed. The photos are sleek and stylish.

58 Vol. 10 No. 5 Vol. 10 No. 5 59 Why did you abandon using Chinese models with awkward bodies and mundane expressions?

Wang Qingsong: I wanted to test out a new idea of using foreigners or different models to reflect China’s new reality. I entered a group show with those photos. Many people did not recognize them as mine at first. But I think, like my speech pattern, no matter what subject matter or what kind of models I use, I always retain my own style.

Danielle Shang: You won’t go back to using Chinese models?

Wang Qingsong: I don’t think so, at least for now. I’m in the process of exploring new possibilities, and I want to go to Los Angeles to do a project. In a foreign country I want to collaborate with foreign models.

Danielle Shang: Your previous work addressed the polarization between the rich and the poor and the tension between Chinese tradition and Western culture. What about now? What does your work focus on?

Wang Qingsong: Social conflicts no longer affect me as strongly as before. I was easily provoked by what happened around me when I was young. Now I contemplate more and reflect more, which slows down my work pace. It takes me longer to decide on a subject matter and how to approach it. Last year, in 2010, I was only able to create two pieces of work.

Wang Qingsong, installation view, International Center of Photography, New York, 2011. Courtesy of the artist.

Danielle Shang: How did you like your first solo exhibition in the US, at the International Center of Photography (ICP), in New York?

Wang Qingsong: They proposed this to me almost five years ago. Originally I was asked to provide enough works to occupy the entire ICP space: upstairs and downstairs. I was also asked to do projects at other possible venues: Asia Society and New Museum were both mentioned. Not long before the opening, I was told that the exhibition was going to occupy only a portion of downstairs, with only fifteen pieces. The catalogue was cancelled as well. I was disappointed and nervous. However, I was wonderfully surprised at the opening, because almost two thousand people showed up to see my work. So many curators, collectors, critics, journalists, and gallerists came. They all took my work seriously. I was happy and satisfied with the job that ICP did. I realize now that the scale of the exhibition and a catalogue are not as important as having people see my work.

60 Vol. 10 No. 5 Wang Qingsong, installation view, International Center of Photography, New York, 2011. Courtesy of the artist.

Danielle Shang: Have you read all the reviews in the Western media? What do you think? Do you think their writing reflects what your work is about?

Wang Qingsong: I don’t think it matters. It’s great to have a different point of view, even if it is not what I intended it to be. It creates legend and mystery. I like it!

Danielle Shang: You stated that was the centre of the international attention because of the Olympics and the World Expo. Now that the Beijing Olympics and Shanghai World Expo are in the past, what are your thoughts on the future of Chinese art?

Wang Qingsong: The Chinese art market was in an economic bubble before, but the bubbles won’t disappear so easily. The art system in the West tends to predict what’s next or what the rules are. How can you set rules? Art is meant to push the envelope. Chinese art has a different vitality and dynamic. It’s more spontaneous. There has not been an international super star from China yet. Ai Weiwei could very likely become one.

Danielle Shang: What are you going to do next? Is your new studio in Song Zhuang ready for you to move in?

Wang Qingsong: Almost. I will spend some time getting to know the new studio space before I begin producing work. Hopefully I can create four or five pieces this year. And next year I’ll concentrate on only one piece. I am not interested in the market or even exhibitions any more. I want to plan what I want to do in ten years: a real long-term plan.

Notes 1 As part of the ‘85 New Wave Movement, many experimental and avant-garde exhibitions were held in Hubei, such as Hubei Invitational Exhibition of New Chinese Ink Painting, in 1985, and Hubei Art Festival of Young Artists, in 1986. 2 During the ’85 New Wave, these publications were widely called “two journals and one newspaper.” 3 Han Xizai was the protagonist of the painting Night Revels of Han Xizai, by Gu Hongzhong (937–975). The narrative painting included five extravagant entertainment scenes at Han’s house. Han Xizai, a talented artist and intellectual, indulged himself with excessive revelry to escape his feeling of powerlessness and frustration towards politics.

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