Wang Yanxin’s works are all performance art, and compared to the directness of other performance artists, his pieces hide a historical event or text behind them. Take his performance video Centenary (2021), for example. The piece was filmed in an abandoned segment of the Yunnan-Vietnam Railway tunnel, where one hundred fireworks were set off. These fireworks were not intended to imitate another firework artist, but rather to enter a historical dimension. They are a natural expression of an exploration of a historical event, an industrial heritage, or a historical relic.

From the first railway built by the British Jardine Matheson & Co. in China (the Wusong Railway), to the Qing officials inspecting the construction by sedan chair (rather than by train), and later repurchasing and dismantling it at great cost, to today’s 159,000 kilometers of railroads, of which 45,000 kilometers are high-speed rail, the history of China’s railways is rooted in a semi-colonial context. It carries with it the spread of knowledge and technology from the West to China in the late Qing period, the construction of the modern nation-state (as in Sun Yat-sen’s Plan for the Establishment of the Republic), and, in the high-speed rail era, infrastructure investment as a symbol of Chinese modernization. From the late imperial period to the 21st century, the relationship between the railway and the state has been symbiotic. The history of Chinese railways is not just the local history of a particular railway line or Chinese history, but the Chinese version of global railway history, or the Chinese story within the global narrative.

The Yunnan-Vietnam Railway was a product of 19th-century British and French colonial invasions into Southeast Asia and China. Built primarily by the French, it opened fully in 1910. In 1946, through the Sino-French Treaty of Friendship, the railway’s Yunnan section was formally returned to China. During its construction, “blood stained the Nanxi River, corpses lined the Yunnan-Vietnam Railway. The mountains were covered in white bones, and the valleys flowed with blood and tears,” became a symbol of the oppression suffered by the Chinese people during the colonial period. Today, the Yunnan-Vietnam Railway serves as part of the rail network connecting China with ASEAN. The eastern (Kunming to Hekou) and central (Kunming to Vientiane) lines of the Pan-Asian Railway in Southeast Asia have been completed and are operational.

Historians often complain that history lacks real people. They mean that history presents grand narratives, but not the history of ordinary people. The “laborers” at the bottom, crushed by the wheels of history, are often forgotten. This is one of the main reasons for the rise of microhistory in recent years. Books like Carlo Ginzburg’s The Cheese and the Worms: The Cosmos of a Sixteenth-Century Miller, Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie’s Montaillou: The Promised Land of Languedoc, Jonathan Spence’s The Death of Wang: The Fate of Small Characters Behind Great History, and Shen Aidi’s Waking from Dreams: The Life of a North Chinese Resident, as well as Luo Xin’s The Long Afterlife, all try to restore a complete history for these small individuals. Thus, Wang Yanxin’s 100 fireworks are undoubtedly a tribute to the laborers of a century ago. In his work, the fate of small characters under the weight of grand history also deserves attention. His works are not only a reflection on history but also a response to the present.

Golden Fable – Water, Fire (2021) consists of two performance videos, which draw upon two elements: water and fire—one serene, the other intense. Water and fire are incompatible, but the golden sunlight and flames, perhaps alongside common shooting locations—prairies, horses, and riders—bind the two works together in another visual logic and order, achieving both exclusion and fusion in these pieces.

Eight Hours in Search of Death (2021) shows the artist wearing a GoPro camera, wandering freely around Macau for eight hours. Along the way, he encounters various insects that have died, either naturally or from being crushed by humans. He records the time he finds each corpse. At first glance, this work may seem neurotic, absurd, or overly meticulous. These creatures, which are completely ignored by humans, are fragile beings whose lives and deaths, compared to human affairs, seem utterly insignificant. The artist’s persistent behavior reminds me of summer, when I get off the highway and find the car’s hood and engine cover covered with a layer of black fly corpses—unseen creatures coexisting with us in the world. Deep-rooted human centrism makes us forget the equality of all things, neglecting the existence of diverse life forms, and in the face of the strong, the weak are ignored.

In reality, the problem with any issue is the act of thinking and reflecting on it, and the artist is a group that remains highly sensitive, magnifying such problems for the viewer. If we were to swap humans with insects, in comparison to other unknown things (such as dark matter or extraterrestrial civilizations), what does the death of an individual human really mean? In the universe, what is the significance of Earth’s “pale blue dot”? Whether something is big or small is relative. It depends on the reference system you choose: is the human small, or are the insects small?

Wang Yanxin’s works are independent of each other, with no thematic connection. From historical subjects (Chinese laborers who died during the construction of the Yunnan-Vietnam Railway), material elements (water, fire), to the Buddhist notion of “equality of all beings,” they generally focus on the care and attention to life. Although the death of an insect cannot be compared to the death of a laborer, what does the loss of an individual life mean in the grand narrative of humanity? Where does the significance of individual lives lost in today’s regional conflicts and wars lie? Recently, Russian opposition figure Alexei Navalny died under suspicious circumstances in prison, prompting large-scale protests in Russia. One elderly woman told the camera, “One person sacrificed themselves to save the country, and another sacrificed the entire country to save themselves.”

In The Death of Wang, Jonathan Spence writes, “What’s ironic is that Chinese people have been extremely meticulous in recording national and local histories, yet local records are mostly lost. We often cannot find documents like autopsy reports, guild transactions, land leasing records, or parish birth, marriage, and death records—which are precisely the kinds of materials that allow us to make extremely detailed interpretations of late medieval European history.” Spence pointed out the severe lack of personal history in Chinese historical records, and behind this is the way ordinary lives are trampled under the wheels of grand history and power, as insignificant as grass. Wang Yanxin’s Centenary and Eight Hours in Search of Death attempt to invert this unbalanced history with symbolic actions and micro-performances, striving to reclaim respect and space for life for these insect-like individual beings.

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