Wang Jianwei

Wang Jianwei (born October 28, 1958) is a new media, performance, and installation artist based in Beijing, China.

Born in Suining, Sichuan Province, China, in 1958, Wang Jianwei lived in a traditional military family until 1966.

Both of his parents were soldiers, and he spent his childhood in military camps, also known as budui dayuan.

In 1966, the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution was launched by the Chinese Communist Party leaders, which advocated "the abolishment of the four olds" (old ideas, old culture, old customs, and old habits).

During this time, Wang was left fatherless, his father being sent to a reeducation camp/village that turned "peasants into workers."

His father returned in 1974.

After graduating from high school in 1975, Wang relocated to the countryside.

It was here that he took private painting classes from a local stage designer who worked for a Sichuan opera company and started to paint in realism.

Also during this time, Wang began to study Russian literature and painting.

After two years of reeducation, Wang was conscripted to join the People's Liberation Army in 1977, where he served as a military engineer and operations specialist in a barrack in Qinghe County, Hebei Province, south of Beijing.

He didn't produce any art during his military service.

This system theory, introduced by the Chinese mathematician Deng Julong in 1982, provided a methodology that focused on the study of problems using partial or uncertain information.

In 1983, he met Zhu Guangyan, an army nurse, just before he was discharged.

Less than a year later, they were married.

After marriage, Wang and Zhu lived separately for almost seven years due to the government household registration system, known as the hukou registration system.

Zhu was registered in Beijing, while Wang was linked to his parents back in Chengdu, Sichuan Province.

In 1983, the military assigned Wang to work as a store manager at the Chengdu Painting Institute, Chengdu Huayuan.

During this time, he was exposed to a variety of Western art styles inspiring a series of pen drawings and sketches of patrons at a local teahouse.

In 1983, Wang painted Dear Mother, a work that renewed the academic realist style of the Sichuan Painting School, a style developed by students of the Sichuan Fine Arts Institute, Sichuan Meishu Xueyuan.

The Sichuan Painting School style focuses on details of everyday life and yielded works that were often melancholic and poetic in nature.

Dear Mother won the Gold Award in its category at the Sixth National Fine Arts Exhibition at the National Art Gallery (now National Art Museum of China) in 1984, an exhibition that included works from young academic graduates and established artists in China.

Also in 1984, Wang met his future teacher, Zheng Shengtian, who had just returned to China from the United States and brought along materials that referenced Western contemporary art.

This was Wang's first exposure to installation and environmental art which had a profound impact on his later style.

The "85 New Wave Art Movement" ("85 Xinchao meishu yundong") between 1985 and 1989 was a nationwide avant-garde movement that was stimulated by increasing contact and exchange with the contemporary international art world.

In 1985, the National Art Gallery hosted the Rauschenberg Overseas Culture Interchange project, which introduced Wang to the work of Robert Rauschenberg, an artist who had significant impact on emerging avant-garde artists and specifically on the development of installation art in China.

The same year, Wang enrolled in a graduate program for oil painting at the Zhejiang Academy of Fine Arts, now China Academy of Art, in Hangzhou, Zhejiang Province; he graduated in 1987.

During the graduate studies, he read many previously forbidden books on Western literature and philosophy, and was influenced by Existentialists such as Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Camus, and Jorge Luis Borges.

After graduating from the Zhejiang Academy of Fine Arts, Wang produced his Tea House series (1989–1990), paintings that depict elderly residents drinking tea and passing time in local teahouses.

Additionally, the "85 New Wave Art Movement" inspired an exhibition of new Chinese art, the 1989 China/Avant-Garde show at the National Art Gallery, which drew attention of the Chinese authorities, and helped catalyze the 1989 Tiananmen Square protest.

His visual treatment of the passage of time and movement of the subjects resembled the work of Francis Bacon, even though he was not aware of the latter until 1990.

In 1990, Wang connected with the Beijing-based art group the New Measurement Group (Xin kedu), which included Chen Shaoping, Gu Dexin, and Wang Luyan.

The group shared many of Wang's perspectives in conceptual and experimental art practices and art making.

The Tea House series was shown in a solo exhibition at the Cultural Palace of Nationalities in Beijing in 1991.

During his early years, Wang developed his signature style, employing a documentary practice of studying, observing, sketching, and interacting with his subjects.

It is said his process incorporated performing a cultural study of a microsociety.

In 1992, Wang became interested in the "grey system," also known as "grey relational analysis".

Wang created his first conceptual installation work, Document (1992), at his house.

With Document, Wang aimed at activating what he termed the "grey zone," or "in-between" space, signaling predictions in a combined artistic and scientific experimental process.

A year later, Wang also created Incident¬–Process, State (1993), an installation including video, text, and sculpture at the Hong Kong Arts Centre, inspired by the grey system.

Inspired by a book written by a biologist about the science of crop growth, Wang returned to the village where he received reeducation, and collaborated with a local farmer to stage a performance Circulation–Sowing and Harvesting (1993–1994).