Despite Wang Bing’s international reputation, with the documentarian and video artist having won two major film awards—the EYE Art and Film Prize and the Golden Leopard—in 2017, “Experience and Poverty” at Magician Space in Beijing’s 798 Art District was his first solo exhibition in China, with three videos on show.
Wang’s creations have several signature filmic qualities. Via deceptively simple but exemplary camera work, he becomes a fly on the wall to, as the artist has said in one interview, “capture the truth of [his subject’s] existence.” The artist often operates the camera himself, setting up long, drawn-out shots. Some of his films have extremely long durations—one of this exhibition’s videos, 15 Hours (2017), takes its title from its running length. Wang also maintains an uncompromising focus on marginalized, struggling, poverty-stricken figures, whose lives stand in stark contrast to those in China’s prosperous metropolises, equipping his films with a blunted sense of political criticism, although this is almost never explicit.
At Magician Space, the comparatively short, 28-minute Traces re-worked and exhibited in 2014 but filmed several years earlier, played on loop. In the video, Wang walks around a section of the Gobi Desert in Gansu province, in northern China, with his lens pointed to the ground, filming human bones. The remote location was once a forced labor camp for rightists, where many died of starvation and were subsequently wrapped together in fabric rather than buried. Over time, this material wore away, leaving bones scattered across the landscape. This is Wang’s only video work to be shot on film rather than digitally, though it was digitized in post-production, with adjustments to the audio. The end result is a grainy, black-and-white study of the landscape, characterless, but for heavy steps, a whirring camera and loud breathing produced by the cameraman, Wang himself. Traces stands as a good introduction to this auteur’s deeply intrinsic relationship to his films.
Two of Wang’s newest works were included in “Poverty and Experience.” Mrs Fang and 15 Hours (both 2017) were screened in a cinema-like setting in an adjacent space, according to a schedule. The latter documents 15 hours of activity in a garment factory in Zhejiang province. Taking his protracted shots to an extreme, the endurance needed for these laborers’ daily 15-hour shifts is emphasized by Wang’s extended stint as the camera operator and the presentation’s drawn-out runtime, which out of necessity has to be played out over two days, inadvertently serving to further foreground the drudgery of factory labor and the inhumanity of this arrangement.
Mrs Fang, which won Wang the Golden Leopard at the 70th Locarno International Film Festival, is a comparatively short 90-minute film that follows the last seven days of Fang Xiuying’s life. She is inflicted with Alzheimer’s disease, and Wang’s shots from inside her bedroom show her in a practically vegetative state, with just the slightest indication of functioning awareness. The artist is good friends with Fang’s daughter, and had plans to make a film about them, but was told that his subject didn’t have long to live, and filming would have to take place immediately. This led to his first film to focus directly on the subject of death.
Mrs Fang illustrates how Wang allows the narratives that he records to unfold naturally. In one scene, we begin in Fang’s bedroom, where the protagonist is surrounded by family members. We find out that Fang’s grandson decided to leave the village the night before, which leads to an argument among the family. Fang’s son-in-law exits the house, and sits with three others around a table of food, cigarettes and beer, complaining about the grandson’s behavior.
As with many of Wang’s films, including the two others in this exhibition, Mrs Fang is often hard to watch due to its emotional impact. It is a painful struggle to align what we see with commonly pushed visions of a prosperous, modern China. Nonetheless, Wang’s skill as an auteur, coupled with his unique access to invisible subjects, makes his films crucial historical documents and equally important additions to the canon of art history.
Wang Bing’s “Experience and Poverty” is on view at Magician Space, Beijing, until December 31, 2017.
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