王彦鑫：我在场 Wang Yanxin: I’M PERESENT

 “I come off somewhat standoffish, a bit cold. Maybe because I’m from the Northwest, my bones have a bit of wolf in them.” These are words Wang Yanxin uses to describe himself, and it just might really be how people perceive him. The first time I met Wang Yanxin was during a live art work at an exhibition in Sichuan Fine Arts Institute. He was slapping himself on the face while asking people in front him, “What’s your name?” Those he asked refused to answer, completely unaware that each time after asking, the artist would add force and slap himself even harder. The audience couldn’t bear it, and others would say “Just tell him.” But no matter what, no one would talk to him, and the scene grew increasingly awkward, making the artwork more than memorable. Upon asking, I learned that this artist was named Wang Yanxin, and that the artwork was titled Your Name.  Much like Hu Jiayi and Tong Wenmin, he is amongst the first students in Sichuan Fine Arts Institute’s New Media department. What’s different about him is that Wang Yanxin is one of the only male students. The department titled a women’s’ exhibition Ten Golden Flowers, but never held a more masculine Ten Big Diamonds exhibition for male students.  From this we get a sense of the female/male ratio in the department.

Wang Yanxin’s artworks prior to 2017 seem a bit basic. They are classical performance artworks, using the body as their main component, emphasizing pain and pushing the body beyond its limits in a way that especially touches viewing audiences. These types of artworks rely on a high degree of interactivity with audiences, sometimes seeming to foreground a type of heroism in leading the audience to think in certain ways, making it hard for the audience to distinguish between the real and theatrical, sometimes even leading people to mistake the absurd for the real. Then add the body’s intervention, and audiences’ willing or coerced involvement in order to explore audience-audience and artwork-audience relationships. There was also a focus upon sites of contradiction and minute differences between performance environment and artist’s inner experience of the artwork. This helped the audience to form new definitions regarding artist, artwork and performance site. Wang Yanxin finds habituated thinking abhorrent. However art and life are not as close as we think. Wang Yanxin is very clear about this, saying that, “I’m very happy in the process of creating performance artworks. I learn something new each and every single day. There’s a lot of inspiration and I feel really engaged with life.” Attentive audience members or audiences familiar with many of Wang Yanxin’s artworks may discover that accompanying his physical presence in each artwork, there is a lexicon being sprinkled throughout his corpus; words such as ‘power’, ‘hero’,’ history is good for you’, ‘war’, ‘magic’ and so on. As he explains, “Because I can’t stand some of the absurdities endemic to history, sometimes I like to just look at things around me in the midst of performing, and I feel these historical forces bearing down upon me, and I this is how I vocalize these connections.”

“The body has to revolt, it starts to shake, and I’m forced to rethink that which I can and can’t control about my body. To place the body in a public space, let it develop a relationship with nature and reality, to remap relationships formed by the body in space. To have the body interact with the public, re-apprehend the subtle changes between people, and to write the body’s language and creative train of thought.” In his description of his work, we see that Wang Yanxin has clear understanding of his body. Starting in 2016, his artworks saw a series of transformations, as he did White Tower, White, Baliufengxue, Double-image, Red Wall, Black Cloud, Obstruct One Hour, Red Carpet, Rusty Knife, Disappearing Orbit, Thinking of Dawn in the Dead of Night, Belief, Blueprint, and Writing History. These are all public works which take on a new rubric for the artist, involving the following new components. Firstly the artist lets go of spoken language; the sounds produced in the artwork are only naturally occurring non-human sounds. Next there are spatial changes, for example moving from a boxed-in space to a public or natural space, reflecting the artist’s progress towards a more natural bearing. Third, the body is more taken advantage of in its use, placing the body in an environment in ways which point out human existential predicaments. At the same time, Wang Yanxin is also constantly enriching the way he places his body in space; the visually poetic body; the social spectacle body, the hidden body.

Wang Yanxin starts with the body, ceaselessly examining its relationship both to itself as well as others. As he continues along this path, he develops more of a realist and humanities concern, bearing a unique understanding of definitions of site and linguistic exploration. Wang Yanxin persists, believing that over time his accumulated artistic exploration will be of great use. He encourages himself by saying, “If I want to, I just do it, and keep doing it, stubbornly sticking my one’s guns. Only in this way can I strike upon my own path.”

September 18, 2017, Huangtukan, Chengdu, China