Rotation: Chinese Multimedia Artist Wang Gongxin’s Reincarnation

Description

Wang Gongxin trained as a painter in the socialist-realist style, and even after seeing video art for the first time—during a stay in New York in the 1987 with his wife Lin Tianmiao as a Visiting Professor at the State University of New York in Cortland—he was hesitant about abandoning the brush.

But a curiosity around multimedia and installation art stayed with him, and began to inform more of his work. Later, he realised that video art offered him a freedom he couldn’t resist. Back in China, he became one of the driving forces in the avant-garde movement, turning his home, and later a corner of a relative’s restaurant, into a gallery where fellow artists could meet and show their work.

Wang Gongxin’s conceptual videos explore the boundary between reality and its replicas by turning seemingly ordinary situations upside down, and also inverting viewers’ expectations.