在时间的废墟上 ——关于王彦鑫的“西北叙事” On the Ruins of Time — Wang Yanxin’s “Northwest Narrative”

From June to July 2004, Wang Yanxin traveled across several sites in Qinghai Province — the nuclear testing base of Jinyintan in Haiyan County, an abandoned labor reform farm in Gangcha County, and a desert area in Gonghe County. There, he created three performance-video works: Jinyintan, In That Distant Place, and Shazhuyu, which together he calls his “Northwest Narrative.”

The “Northwest Narrative” holds crucial significance in Wang Yanxin’s artistic career. It marks the moment when he began to structure his engagement with space — to think and act upon it in an architectural, conceptual way. He intervenes through performance and expresses through video. In performance art, the body unfolds within space, yet in many such practices, space is treated as a neutral background, offering little meaningful information to the behavior itself. In Wang’s “Northwest Narrative,” however, space becomes inseparable from the narrative. His body enters specific, historically charged locations whose spatial information constitutes an essential part of his art’s meaning.

Performance art, for Wang, is not merely a series of acts leading to inner experience, nor simply a gesture for the expression of an idea. It can also be an artist’s response to specific realities or historical spaces, revealing new forms of spatial experience. This approach was already visible in his earlier works — When We Meet Again (2018), created within the nuclear exclusion zone in Fukushima, and Centenary and 1001 Lights (2021), both performed in an abandoned tunnel along the Yunnan–Vietnam Railway. In the past, these works were often occasioned by particular projects that led him into such sites. Yet Wang consistently demonstrated a rare sensitivity to these environments, capturing their atmosphere and meaning, and intervening in poetic, humorous, solemn, or absurd ways. As he became more familiar with such spatial engagements, he began to ask a deeper question: What does space mean to me? What kind of space should I think about?

No longer content to enter spaces defined by others’ projects, Wang set out to discover and intervene in spaces that hold personal meaning. The “Northwest Narrative” is the result of this conscious turn — a self-aware exploration and study of space.

This self-awareness can be understood in two dimensions:

First, a recognition of the link between the Northwest and personal experience.
Wang’s early understanding of performance art and the body stemmed from conceptual and theoretical learning. While knowledge and theory helped him analyze the body and its perceptual systems, they also led to a gradual estrangement from his own embodied experience. In the current era, dominated by artificial intelligence and information overload, the body has been stripped of its agency — overwhelmed by data and abstraction, its sensory capacities are in decline. Realizing this, Wang began to reawaken a sense of locality and memory long buried within him.

Born in Lanzhou, Gansu — part of the broader cultural and political construct of “the Northwest” — Wang does not seek to define his identity through regionalism. Yet he feels compelled to re-engage with place through a personal lens, to transform the abstract notion of “Northwest” into embodied experience. This is not a retreat into parochial localism, but an attempt to expose the heterogeneity within the grand narrative of the Northwest.

Second, a structural reflection on space.
In the 1950s, China built its first nuclear weapons research base on the Jinyintan grasslands. This was a product of the early Cold War — and after the Cold War ended, the site was officially decommissioned in May 1995. Both China’s first atomic and hydrogen bombs were developed and tested there, marking an event of great historical and geopolitical significance. Today, the site has been preserved as a patriotic education base, widely accepted as a legitimate locus of national memory.

But what should be remembered? And what should be forgotten?

With these questions, Wang turned his gaze to a state-run labor reform farm located between Gangcha County and Delingha — a site built during the same historical period as the nuclear base. The farm, carved out of desolate land, was meant to increase agricultural production, but it also carried strong political meaning. Within it were experts and workers, but the main labor force consisted of prisoners, re-education laborers, and those who remained after serving their sentences — collectively called the “three categories of personnel.” Over time, these farms disappeared from the landscape like dust in the wind, leaving only ruins, often sealed off and deemed unworthy of remembrance.

In That Distant Place was filmed at such a farm and its adjacent prison, now reclaimed by desolation — returning to the barren state that preceded its construction. It was this emptiness that led Wang to shift his focus toward the desert. From the nuclear base to the labor camp and then to the desert, the “Northwest Narrative” unfolds across three structural spaces — each echoing themes of memory, disappearance, and eternity.

Through this structural thinking, Wang attempts to connect these three spaces and the experiences they produce. A recurring theme across the trilogy is time. In each work, he wears a stopped clock on his chest, attempting — absurdly — to adjust its time. Within an uncalibrated timescale, time itself becomes dislocated and chaotic. As Wang reflects in his statement for Jinyintan:

“In this space, time neither moves forward nor backward. It remains suspended at an unreachable moment — unchangeable, unforgettable. There is no clear timeline, no definite beginning or end. Together they form an unresolved image — the human struggle with the inescapable pain and anxiety of history.”

Linear time is disrupted. Another temporal sense emerges through Wang’s ritualized interventions into space — evoked not only by the broken clock but also by his hybrid use of historical symbols, mock-ritual gestures, and absurd performance. The complex historical references summon memory; the pseudo-magical rituals invoke a transcendent or ghostly temporality; and the absurd actions dissolve logic altogether. Through absurdity, the fixed meanings of space collapse, allowing new meanings to emerge from the ruins of the old.

The “Northwest Narrative” thus becomes a structural expression built upon the ruins of time. Wang not only begins to consciously choose his spaces but also to think relationally — linking personal experience to external, objective environments and even incorporating them into his inner world. Whether the site is a nuclear city, a labor camp, or a desert, these monumental yet distant spaces become active only through Wang’s self-aware reflection on the Northwest as a field of lived experience.

If Wang’s “Northwest Narrative” represents a shift in his mode of artistic cognition, it also expands his understanding of individuality and its meaning. The individual, in his view, is not a closed entity but a dynamic result of continuous interaction with the external world — even when that world is vast, distant, or blurred.

Perhaps, then, the “Northwest Narrative” is not the conclusion of Wang Yanxin’s work on the Northwest, but rather its beginning.