Unspeakable Chaos: Interview with Wang Tuo

Beijing-based Wang Tuo’s video installations are visually rich, multi-narrative dramas. Trained as a painter at Beijing’s Tsinghua University, Wang’s practice took a turn when he began his Master of Fine Arts degree at the School of Visual Art, Boston, in 2013. There, prompted by French philosopher Guy Debord’s critique of commodity fetishism, The Society of the Spectacle (1967), he began to create video works interweaving fiction and non-fiction, the dramatic and the humorous, incisively commenting on the dynamics and contradictions of human relationships. After graduating, Wang moved to New York, where he took part in various local residencies, hosted by organizations including NARS Foundation, Residency Unlimited, and the Queens Museum. In 2017, he left the United States and moved back to China—another transition that prompted him to re-evaluate his artistic practice.

Earlier this year, Wang visited New York for his solo show at Present Co., where he showed his latest work, Smoke and Fire (2018). I met with the artist on the occasion of the exhibition. Our conversation picked up with when we first met in 2015, and spanned Wang’s past and recent projects, as well as his longstanding interests in topics such as overlapping realities, re-imagined spaces, manipulation, spirituality, psychology, emotions, and lived experiences.

When we first met in 2015 in New York, your practice was based on blurring fiction and non-fiction. This gesture can be seen in the video Real and Natural (2014), in which a literature professor’s analytical discussion about Theodor Fontane’s novel Effi Briest (1895) and Émile Zola’s Thérèse Raquin (1867) is juxtaposed with two actors delivering half-improvised monologues based on the stories and their own experiences. Although there is still non-linearity, the treatment of the boundary between fact and fiction seems to me to be more subtle in your recent video Smoke and Fire (2018). What has changed and what has stayed the same?

My art practice is localized. The objects that I scrutinize are closely associated with my current situation. What I have confronted in the US and in China are very different, which indirectly affects my expression, in a way. Nevertheless, the understanding of performance art has always been at the core of my methodology. Instead of claiming that performance is about the body as a material, it is better to say that it is like a movement. This movement can manipulate the body, it can also manipulate human lived experience, affections, trauma, even collective memories, and ideologies. With my previous works, such as Real and Natural, I was interested in the interdependent and contradictory relationship between human experience and the archive, especially the way in which the two transform and become each other. The work, with the re-enactment of historical literature in contemporary life, is underpinned by this notion of performance as movement.

My understanding of performance still plays a key role in how I deal with my subjects, but after my return to China, my art has been based on the unique personal experiences here. Unlike my practice in the US, the filmic “manipulation” of my subjects isn’t so much of a concern. “Manipulation” can be understood as the process of me demonstrating my argument. In my projects in China, I hope that there is no explicit argument. I want to present a structure that is similar to the complexity of reality, allowing the audience to produce an experience of connection, so they can directly feel the emotional power of a work.

Speaking of your relationship with your home country, you once told me that since your return to Beijing, you have felt more involved in what you define as “the indulgence of feeling lost in the complexity of living in China.” Could you explain?

When I was in the US, China became an object that I could observe. I had access to information that was difficult to obtain before—a clear and logical outline of the country. I gradually started to understand China because it became a textual object that could be described and judged. With such textualization, it is easier to choose a position. But reality is far more complicated. After returning to China again, these positions and the information that I obtained quickly became ineffective and unproductive. When trying to understand these realities in a textual way, I become unsatisfied. When I think that I understand a certain rule, the undescriptive, mysterious abyss hidden behind reveals its existence. This is an endless process full of frustration. 

What do you mean by frustration—could you elaborate?

I am thinking of HP Lovecraft’s stories about the Ancient Old One Cthulhu, in which the experience of the characters is: the nearer you are to the truth, the closer you are to madness. Such a paradox also helps me understand why Chinese art has been so dependent on rhetoric for thousands of years. Metaphor and analogy seem to have become the last and most effective devices where the textualization of China’s reality remains extremely difficult. I’m also thinking about Tang dynasty writer Li Bai’s poems depicting the difficulties of entering the land of Shu, through which readers glimpse society’s suffering at the time. Textualization is straightforward and provocative, but it often flattens realities, as if one or more conclusions can summarize our surroundings. Some environments are suitable for such operations, at least for people to obtain standpoints and judgments in a moral sense, but in this moment China is not one of these environments. Therefore, I started trying to avoid this textual tendency in my creations. The reality in China is still the truth that I am trying to approach, but I avoid rendering the process of argumentation or judgment. My working method can also be said to be a new form of rhetoric, but I prefer to call it a structural substitution. Instead of giving a subjective and fleeting judgment, I want to present a complex structure in my work. This structure will have many intertwined levels, and the narratives in each level are non-causal, but eventually produce a chemical reaction that creates new chaos. I want this unspeakable chaos to replace the complex configuration of the reality that we are confronted with.

In Smoke and Fire, you piece together still images. The first appearance of this technique in your oeuvre is in the video The Interrogation (2017), which has two narrative strands—one about a police officer and the other about an actress who refuses to speak. The disjointed interactions between the characters emphasize the sincopato rhythm of still images rather than the fluidity of the moving ones. What opportunities does this technique provide?

In the research phase of a project, I often use painting, drawing, photography, and Photoshop to intervene in images, as a methodology to organize and visualize ideas. One of the vital reasons for employing images in my work is that we have been drowned in the history of reading paintings for thousands of years. The inertia of visual perception has deep roots. The power of static images is so broad yet restrained. Static images possess a different texture or dimension compared to moving images, which we have been interpreting for just over a century. In the 18-minute-long The Interrogation, I used only still images to complete the interlacing of several complex narrative layers. The inspiration of director Chris Marker was undoubtedly extremely important to me. But when working on The Interrogation, the usage of still images was not even negotiable. There exists a subtle exchange of identity between the two protagonists in the video: the narrator becomes an interrogator after a successful job interview, and the interview in the daytime becomes an austere interrogation at night. People and objects in frozen frames are carriers waiting to be filled with a certain narrative.

How did you apply this technique in Smoke and Fire?

In Smoke and Fire, in order to build two parallel worlds connected by the protagonist, I mix a colorful cinematic story with a world of black-and-white photography. These two worlds may imply reality and fiction, and could also possibly refer to the physical world and the psychological or spiritual world. In the narrative of the black-and-white photos, the male protagonist is reading some ancient Chinese tales. The rapid switching of photos implies flipping pages. Just like Austin Wright’s Tony and Susan (1993), which is a novel about a person reading another novel, there exists an inextricable link between the fictional world of the ancient tales and the life of the reader. The fiction points to the soul, whereas the real world points to the body. Reading becomes the very channel between the two realms.

Smoke and Fire is inspired by an actual event that happened last year in Hanzhong, where a man, Zhang Koukou, waited 22 years to avenge his mother’s death. I keep thinking of the simmering “frustration” within the work, and how that relates to today’s political distortions, which instigate anger and social tension. Have you ever considered your work as political?

I contend that a very interesting phenomenon in the contemporary art world is not “politicization” but “para-politicization.” The former is a direct approach in a work, and an effective means of intervention. “Para-politicization” is the tendency to interpret all art as political. I feel that I can’t judge these interpretations or working methods. However, in my art practice, politics are really not my main concern. Even for an issue strongly connected to politics, the thing that always shocks me the most is the human emotion. 

Tell me more about emotion, then, and how it unfolds in Smoke and Fire.

The media and public’s discussion of Zhang Koukou deeply influenced me. Zhang’s plot for revenge is the same as those found in the legends of ancient Chinese heroes. Most people only know the old stories through reading, yet now the story is like a flying stone that landed in our lives, suddenly activating our connections to our ancestors. Linear time doesn’t exist in China, where you can find the coexistence of industrial civilization and ancient traditions from 5,000 years ago. It also reminds me that China is actually a reality that is suitable for the theory of synchronicity by Carl Gustav Jung. That is to say, events here do not rely entirely on causality. A non-causal yet still meaningful connection can present itself, where the cause and effect exist simultaneously. 

Another source of inspiration for me is the short story The Student (1894) by Anton Chekhov, which represents a similar situation that I attempt to express in my art. In the story, a student of a clerical academy joins a widow and her daughter in their home on a cold winter night. In front of the fire, he tells the story of a similar cold and dark night—the eve of Jesus’s crucifixion. When speaking of Peter, who wept bitterly because he had realized that he had not recognized the Lord three times, the student unexpectedly discovered that the widow and her daughter were also shedding tears. Chekhov writes: “It was evident that what he had just been telling them about, which had happened 19 centuries ago, had a relation to the present—to both women, to the desolate village, to himself, to all people.” He found out that the events, drifting across the course of time, may have had no causal connections, but “when he touched one end the other quivered.”

Here, two unrelated events 1,900 years apart, are tied together by tears. There are often overlaps between times and spaces, and the medium that connects these folds is emotion and the body.

In keeping with this notion of non-linear narratives, your videos are often structured across multiple channels, and involve collaborative interactions. As such, their structures recall that of the opera tradition, with its layered stories, and crowded  stages. Do you see a connection between your work and opera? 

Operas and dramas have a great influence on how I construct narrative structures and how I imagine dialogues within space. My video works often have multiple narratives, similar to the intertwining of recitativo and aria in operas, which can be seen as a dialogue between a plot with no melody and an emotional expression with a melody. The way that multi-channel video installations mobilize the viewer’s gaze resembles the movement on the theater stage. Viewers have to make a choice as to what they look at, they can no longer just stare at one place. They need to move their bodies, making them active participants.