Asia
Wang Xu
Summer Wind Before Rain
2017
Wang Xu, Summer Wind Before Rain, 2017. Film still.
Wang Xu’s video Summer Wind Before Rain was made during his residency last summer at Storm King, where he lived in a hut made of wood and gathered clay from the nearby forest. During his residency, he interacted only with the sculpture park’s gardener. In the eleven-minute video, we see the gardener ride a lawn mower the size of a golf cart, and we observe the artist slowly make a large, realistic bust of the gardener, bit by bit and layer of clay by layer. This video is pastoral, performative, conceptual, and quite unique.
The artist Wang Xu works mainly in sculpture and video installation. His practice is tainted with senses of eeriness, kindness and reverie, mediated in delicate and surreal works or compositions. For Wang, sculpture occupies an ambiguous space between objects, experience, and social practice, interceded by time and personal memories. His work, at once taking distance from and addressing the history of art and sculpture, aims to question the nature of social relations, transcendence and alienation in all fields of contemporary, liberal societies. Wang’s work is intensely concerned with notions of agency and chance from the perspective of both individuals and communities, which he often symbolically pictures under the traits of animals. Institutional critique and fairy-tale imaginaries influenced his work as much, relentlessly questioning one’s ability to escape determining networks and narratives.