A Conversation with Wang Qingsong
20th March, 2020
In July, 2019 Wang Qingsong (WQ) spoke with a group of art history students from the University of Western Australia in his Beijing studio. His words were translated by curator and lecturer Zhang Fang (ZF), who is also his partner. We are most grateful to Zhang and Wang for their time, and their generosity in sharing their time with us. Zhang sometimes speaks in first, and sometimes in third person, and also refers to ‘we’, referring to their generation of Chinese people who grew up in the Cultural Revolution, or to their work together. Some of these tenses have been changed for clarity, but others have been left as they were spoken.
Wang Qingsong, Dream of Migrants, 2005, archival pigment print, 83.8 x 200.7 cm.
LL: When were you first inspired to pick up a camera? Was it in childhood or later?
WQ/ZF: In childhood, in our teenage years nobody was receiving an art education, nobody was doing art classes, it was not even offered in primary school. When my father passed away, and he was a breadwinner, my mother was from a landlord family but had no education. She was illiterate, and couldn’t raise her four kids. So after he finished high school he had to find a job to support his whole family.
In the early 1980s, people generally picked up their parents jobs, so he picked up his father’s job of being an oil driller for an oil company for seven or eight years. During this time he realised there is no way out, and his mother was inspiring, and said that someone else’s son was receiving an art education and there was an art school he could apply too. He was just scribbling in high school but he didn’t know how to paint at all, and started to get a formal education in training school at night times. He began to think he might make it to college. So while working in the drilling company, during the July national exam days he went five times to the examination. It is so competitive, only one out of two thousand get in. In the 1980s and 1990s there were only eight academies, and each academy could only take twenty or thirty students.
Finally the government realised in the 1990s that they needed to expand art education, and began to receive students who could pay a bit of their education. When we were in college in the 1980s we were all fully funded. He went to a special training school in Sichuan Art Academy that offered selected students who already had jobs a two year painting education. Most of students came from the oil fields. He graduated, didn’t want to go back to work and came to Beijing.
He’s not like many others, whose parents were ink and brush painters or calligraphers. His life seemed to be doomed in the 1980s, when you will be a worker like your parents.
CA: I wanted to ask about your shift photomontage to the staging of these massive scenes to photograph. Why did this happen in your practice?
WQ/ZF: In the 1990s he moved to Beijing, and to the art community, he saw that most artists were either working in performance or painting, but he never wanted to show people what he was painting about. He was mostly painting about people suffocating in plastic bags, where you can see the outside world but you could not breathe. But nobody knew what he was doing. Then China opened up, and artists found success, but he wanted to find his own way. The plastic bag paintings could be interpreted as Cynical Realism or Political Pop.
He began instead printing on silk, and using traditional iconography like peasants and fruits to create happy scenarios. So using gaudy art motifs, using ready-made imagery scanned from popular magazines, but he was not happy because printed onto silk velvet it fades. So he thought if I am already using photographs why not just use photography, and it was then he was using Photoshop to make work around 1996.
However, while he was one of first artists to use photography in China, he didn’t know how to use Photoshop, he had to employ someone who could read the English manuals to do the work for him since he does not understand it. Realising he is not good at digital, he turned to analogue, and made work with a small Minolta 8 by 10. Now he’s using 12 by 20.
JC: Is there a casting process at work in making these big works? How does he select who is going to be in the work?
WQ/ZF: For something this big, he has to create a drawing, a study, and then he will put in here what he wants, what he needs, the kind of people he will have. Seniors, young children, body types, he has to pin down these figures, but usually he will work with a model agency, he will tell the people what he wants and they will bring them in, and they will bring them to site, and he will cast from there. His process is freer however than a usual photo shoot, as he makes changes as he goes along, especially on a larger shoot where he is more spontaneous with the details than a smaller work which is more tightly controlled.
JC: So in Follow Me, are they models or students in this picture?
WQ/ZF: All models. You can’t see their faces. From 1996 to 1999 he used a lot of PS, but from 2000 to 2009, even 2010, we work with the Beijing film studio, and from 2011 we begin to build our own studios. He built his own studio in 2011 that eight metes high. This is because the film studios are subject to censorship. Everyone knows what you are going to do and they come and check. Up to 2005 he was very creative and fruitful, but in 2006 he made a huge work and the government came in and interrogated us. We had a child who was only 2 years old, and so there was a ceiling you couldn’t break. And this work did not end up in the perfect shape. So he started to think it would be much easier if I have my own space, if I can get my own people and be more discreet.
When we made Follow You, in 2003 when we were doing the Photoshoot police came and said there are over 200 people here, there is no exit and there are not enough fire extinguishers. They asked us what we were doing? I said we are doing a Photoshoot for the Venice Pavilion, the China Pavilion in Venice, we have been an official invitation from the China’s Cultural Ministry. We called a professor and got him to speak with the police, and he was smart on the phone!
Also, when he showed Follow You, in the exhibition he had problems. People asked what the question marks means. For his show he made it into a wallpaper so everyone can know what is there written on the walls because they can read it. The censor says that he cannot have question marks, but he said it came from textbooks. They were not happy, so they covered it up because they were not happy with the question mark, which made another work!
In Follow Him, there is a picture of a big library and he was standing up in front. For that scene he used twenty tonnes of books, mostly recycled ones that he collected, and he created these bookshelves. There are many books and magazines he collected, and put them onto the walls. In amidst these books there is one talking about the June fourth student movement. Then he saw that this book was covered up, someone created a label for it, someone covered up a label for this book. People in the government are paid to do these checks, it’s an industry.
JC: How much does censorship inform his work?
WQ/ZF: You can’t avoid it. You have to think about all of these situations, about what to do. You want to avoid danger to your children, your family, your career. We have strategies, like The Art of War.
LM: How has his work been seen overseas, and how is this different from his reception in China? Does the political message of his work become confused internationally?
WQ/ZF: He says China is now intertwined with the world so his concerns are not only about China. The next Photoshoot he wants to make has to do with Leonardo da Vinci’s Last Supper. Since 2007 he has made versions of this, or works inspired by it, and he wants to continue until he has made 13 pieces, the Last Supper is famous and has a religious meaning, but he wants to make work about tricks. In china we have banquets, many banquets and at banquets things are happening with many meanings, so the work is about this.
JC: Is there a school of theory or philosophy that has influenced his practice?
WQ/ZF: He says that to make an artwork you have to avoid reproducing other people works so you have to be familiar with other people’s works, to know art history and other photographic artists, but he does not concentrate on this. His inspiration is mostly from the Cultural Revolution, from 1966 to 1976. Of course it lasted longer than just ten years and those times was also when he was also young and growing up, so he was influenced by this cultural iconography. Of course being an artist in his own way he has freedom to make other things, and not be constrained by history.
Over the last twenty years these are art catalogues that reproduce his work, and inside China he works with many galleries and private spaces and museums but not there are not many Chinese art critics or writers write about his works. Journalists do interviews but nobody does the in-depth reading. Most journalists ask him A and he answers A+, but there are many other people writing in the West that people in China cannot read.
CA: There seems to be a dark humour running through his work. How does that relate to his idea of doing photojournalism?
WQ/ZF: In Chinese tradition, we do not like to deal with issues up front. We are like ants, rather than tigers, in that there is never direct confrontation. His way of interpreting documentary photography is not to document reality frame by frame, but by using this form he is using the unbiased perspective of journalists, this is the way he interprets it, in that he wants to follow exactly what’s being unveiled in front of the camera. When you see something, you document it and it is unbiased, it’s a way of shooting, but it’s the mind’s unbiased objective way of doing things.
When a journalist takes a picture, he frames this section only because it corresponds to his ideas. He wants to show or criticise, or direct people’s attention, so that is the value standard of documentary photography.
SB: How do the objective and subjective relate to each other? How can it be both objective and subjective?
WQ/ZF: Look at Dream of Migrants (2005). You probably have seen one detail of the scenes he is photographing somewhere, but all of it nowhere. He does not set out to capture a scene with a hundred photographs, but instead puts lots of things into one image, like putting ingredients into a hot pot, lots of ingredients into one.
Photography was developed and invented by the West, but the photos can be interpreted in a traditional way. They are connected to the West, but looking at each tiny bit and reading the detail, this is more like traditional Chinese painting, in which there is mountain, cloud, cow, and monk, and you can invent your own story from these details.
Actually these people [in Dream of Migrants] look like movie extras, but they are the people who do things on the street. This is someone who sells BBQ on the streets, all the signs on the street here are signs from real life.
The building itself looks familiar. In the 1970s we lived in courtyards with so many people, with eaves from traditional buildings. All the traditional features in architecture are here, and there is a combination of many other things, this is subjective but overall he wants you to look into the details which are objective. Many things he creates out of his own memories. This muddy lane he creates by digging and creating it. In his childhood there were no supermarkets, and this street scene is created from his childhood.
DG: Is the shape of the building evocative of a mountain, as in traditional Chinese painting?
WQ/ZF: He says that in Chinese traditional paintings you can find similar constructions of this type. And the connection with the broken shacks on two sides, and the symmetrical setting, relates to Chinese understanding of power, dominance and seriousness, but the brokenness means something is going to terminate it, and the storm in the background means there is a disaster coming. On the left side it looks like a real skyline, but in the right corner there are wrinkles so you realise it is a backdrop, it’s not the real thing. Many people ask where did you find this building, but it took twenty or thirty people a month to build!
TX: I have noticed that you put yourself in these works.
WQ/ZF: In his earlier photomontages, he didn’t need to pay anyone. Now, when he’s making bigger scenes, he makes himself a participant or one of the commoners. In many of his earlier works he was prominent but later on he hides somewhere. In this image in particular [in Dream of Migrants] he should be sitting down in the motorcycle, but he forgot to put himself in, as he was calling out for everyone’s attention, so the motorcycle is empty! In this work he wanted to celebrate being ten years in Beijing. He was one of the migrants ten years ago, exploited but not appreciated.
Levi McLean visiting Wang Qingsong’s studio, 2019. Photograph by Darren Jorgensen.
He tries to make his work look like a children’s book. Even the titles are very clear. It’s not in philosophical language, you get it, he wants to make it easy to understand.
CA: There is a lot of emphasis on cultural heritage in China and elsewhere. Can he comment on the role of heritage in his work and in China?
WQ/ZF: His main attitude towards making these works is to remind people of Chinese traditional cultures, and to revive these things and bring them back to cultural awareness. He things it is worth the effort, for example in Chinese traditional ink and wash paintings the differences between intensity and lucidness, there was a contrast between layers, between mist and precise capturing. Nowadays however this has been lost, they do not have this cultural background to enrich the painting. In the old days the difference of layers would be well kept.
Now too the Chinese’s traditional characters have been also been modernised, and although we can all read the old characters we get the new ones. You get the simplified version because we don’t like the old ways. Instead we want to build a new China, with new philosophies, and new characters. We modernised the city and lost this context, and so he wants to remind people of this disruption, to build back this connection.
SB: I’m curious about your university experience. What are your thoughts on art schools in China, and how they function, perhaps compared to previous times?
WQ/ZF: Years ago there were eight art academies in the 1980s and 1990s and thousands of applications, with only twenty or so getting in. Only a few students would be enrolled in a painting classroom. Nowadays to get into art school is competitive but not in the old way. Before, you had to do sketching, to do drawings of a person or a real object. Nowadays, like in Follow You, there are thousands in class and one teacher is talking, and everyone is painting a photograph, rather than a model. It’s not like having different perspectives on a model. That intensity of training is lost.
Many art schools are wanting to catch up to the world. You know the world is concentrating on AI, every school wants to incorporate science, mass media, like MIT, but MIT is not an art school. The students have lost the point. You can use a robot or an assistant to do this kind of work, to do your painting. Nobody has traditional training that comes from one on one with professors. You can do a webinar, to search YouTube, and art education has lost its uniqueness.
He says that in the 1980s we had Bruce Lee, who is a Kung Fu master, and you can tell he is gifted and has the guts to do this, is able to challenge is fighters and you can feel the pain when you see these punches. But now there are so many high tech films, also Kung Fu films but you can’t feel things, there is so much talent but you can’t feel this power impacting.
So he says if you check out COFA [the Chinese Academy of Fine Arts] you see there are so many great artists, that can be shown in biennales, are perfect, with no flaws, but you don’t feel its out of their own heart. If you go to international biennales you feel the same thing.
Likewise talking about graduate shows, there isn’t this personal touch, and similarly with masters creating massive shows. You check in and think this is so masterful, where does he get energy and inspiration to make a museum show. Then you start to think it must have been done by fifty students, five hundred factories, and there must be lots of capital involved. They have lost the traditional way of appreciating art, slowly, having context, where something touches you. So too with film, when you go to watch films, low budget films are very compelling, while Hollywood are not.
SB: How do you fund your own projects?
WQ/ZF: It’s like snowballing. He sells the works and reinvest.
TX: You have the highest auction record for photography.
WQ/ZF: Oh but we don’t see that. The highest was $800,000 for Follow Me, but we sold it for $3,000, even $1,500 because of the gallery’s commission. We know who bought it, the wife or girlfriend of a Russian billionaire.
Follow Me had the cheapest production costs. We spent three days copying these texts on the walls. We made it in the film studio, and the studio gave us a discount, because we were already giving lots of money to the workers.
LL: Was there a moment that he thought that he had made it, that he was a successful artist?
WQ/ZF: He has never been excited about getting an award. Everyone can get an award or commission. But when he went back twenty years ago to see his mother who was sick with cancer, and there was no direct bus, he called a friend and said he cannot go back home, and can you pick me up. His friend told other people, and they told others, another ten people greeted him at the train station. That was the first time people put him into a hotel, a three star hotel.
It’s like me, when they say your husband is very wealthy, I don’t feel that because we started from the very beginning. The first time we showed was in a small pub, and so we went from pub to gallery to museum, and this happens naturally. Many people don’t know what’s going on, and suddenly hear about you, and then say oh you are so well known.
The first overseas trip he made he went to London, and he came back and told his Mum he had been overseas and his Mum didn’t trust him because he didn’t bring any money or souvenirs back. So then he took selfies in London and Rome, and said oh my son is a well-known artist. And then the nurses begin to respect her, because she tells them oh my son is a well-respected artist.
Interviewers are Debbie Chandler Abrahams (CA), Lucy Leech (LL), Sam Beard (SB), Tami Xiang (TX), Jess Cottam (JC), Levi McLean (LM). Transcribed by Darren Jorgensen.