© Wang Qingsong
Wang Qingsong, "Thinker" (1998)
© Wang Qingsong
Wang Qingsong, "Incarnation 1" (2002)
BEIJING, China—Artists are rarely their own best critics, but Wang Qingsong, one of the brightest stars of the contemporary Chinese art scene, is quite insightful in describing his work: “Kitschy, but powerful … Contradictory, but critical” is what he says of his large-scale photographs.
Wang’s recurring subject is the overly enthusiastic embrace of Western culture by a rapidly globalizing China. American brands, especially McDonald’s and Coca-Cola, figure prominently in his highly staged and garishly colored photographic tableaux, which have drawn comparisons to the work of Gregory Crewdson and Jeff Wall; Jeff Koons, too, is frequently brought up when discussing Wang’s work. (Wang himself says he was influenced by the staged photos he saw in newspapers as a youth growing up in Hebei Province, where he was born in 1966—the year the Cultural Revolution began.)
Undeniably humorous, there is also quite a bit of the pathetic, the ludicrous and the sad in in his photographs—they are biting commentaries, lampooning the speed with which an ancient culture has become an ungainly hybrid by jettisoning many of its traditions and adopting many of the less appealing elements of another culture that it doesn't quite understand.
In some of his earlier works, Wang's critique of the worship of consumer goods was explicit. In Requesting Buddha Series No. 1 (1999), an 11-armed figure holds not spiritual objects, but cigarettes, cellphones and cold, hard cash. And in Thinker, the figure strikes a meditative pose, but has the McDonald's logo emblazoned on his chest.
In his more recent, richer, more naunced work, Wang's epic accumulation of detail in his massive, incident-filled images capture the social and aesthetic confusion of a society in rapid transition. They manage to be simultaneously playful and judgemental.
And appropriately enough for an artist concerned with the meeting of East and West, his work contains numerous references to images from both the Western and Chinese canon. In Romantique (a gigantic 21’ x 4’) and China Mansion (120 cm. x 1,200 cm.), Chinese models (mostly nude) strike poses from Western art classics; the Night Revels of Lao Li was inspired by a 10th-century Chinese scroll whose theme is the helplessness of intellectuals in a corrupt society—a thousand years ago and today.
Wang's first solo exhibition in London opens June 9, 2006 at the Albion Gallery and runs through July 16.
Are you surprised by this big boom in interest in Chinese art among collectors in the West? It seemed to start with the Venice Biennale in 1993.
Yes, since 1993, Western people, including gallerists, curators, dealers and collectors, have come to China looking for art. There is not only an increase of exhibitions for Chinese art, but also a lot of commercial gains.
In 1993, I personally thought that the West would lose interest in China in no more than five years, like what the former Soviet Union experienced. But after five years, there was no diminishing interest in Chinese contemporary art. Now 15 years have passed, and the West is still interested in Chinese art.
Nowadays, I am actually more worried that such a sustaining interest will be detrimental to Chinese contemporary art. Therefore, I even hope that the West would leave Chinese artists alone. Maybe less interest will nurture a healthy progress for Chinese artists.
You started as an oil painter in the mid-1990s. What made you switch to working with digital photography?
At the beginning, I worked with painting, which is still my favorite medium. My earlier paintings depicted my own confusion and suffering in this drastically changing society; they were more like a private diary.
In the mid-1990s, Chinese society experienced dramatic changes, and I found painting less effective in capturing a glimpse of that fast movement in China than the camera lens. So I gave up painting in late 1996 and started to experiment with the possibilities of photography to describe my perspectives into this fast changing society.
Let’s talk about your process. How do you go about creating these theatrical scenes?
July 6, 2008 
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