王宁徳 WANGNINGDE

The idea of Some Days was born three years ago. I decided that these new works would be related to growing up, memories, gender, reality and my own attitude toward these problems. The works solve some of these problems, and also bring up new ones. Of course, they are supposed to come back to the most basic of all questions——that of human nature.

    After bidding goodbye to the agreement between traditional imagery and viewers, the first thing I have tried to do is to construct a personal image world and a special district of language. All elements would be united from that district, and this ensures that the future development of the works will not be decided by the artist himself, but these elements will be able to build up a sort of echoing relationship, form their own associations, and this will determine the future direction of the works.

   By deliberately placing less emphasis on the grand historic background in the works, personal text is able to come through more pure. At this time, the whole content extends on like a tunnel. Here, one reaches several crossroads. In a number of the photographs, a sort of dreamlike memory will appear, but this dream exists in the form of the past tense—this is in order to avoid light and superficial attitudes intervening in the realities of history; I believe this is the only way to develop the forces of criticism and satire and bring them to their utmost. In the works, the unnaturalness of the figures’ movements and the “fake” atmosphere comes from patriarchal authority as well as the ever-present pressures of the adult world. However, the absurd and tragic tone of the works is one hundred percent my own true understanding of current life and my awkward experience of it. This last point will become stronger and clearer as the works grow in depth, and will provide direction for future works.

    I have paid close attention to Italo Calvino’s “T Zero” concept. Applied to my works, one should not only consider the static nature and concentration of T Zero, but also time positive and time negative. As regards time negative, I can use extremely rational actions such as sampling, testing, and distilling to clear away the fogs that float on the surface of fact, thereby avoiding melodrama and irrational inquiry. To express time positive, I have used a series of personal pictures to open a window—hazed skies, unpredictable clouds, lakes of despair, etc, are all fixed as eternal landscapes. These are all to condense T Zero, and will magnify and enlarge the concept of “zero," thereby attaching more elements of time to the works.

    I hope the works will be: those in which the simple emotion of the artist can be seen, for which the viewer will experience a concern for the moment and feel the courageous attitude of the artist. In this frame of mind, I now open the curtains of the stage for “a dreamlike tragedy featuring both absurdity and fiction.”