WANG SISHUN

Wang Sishun: Apocalypse

Wang Sishun has spent the last seven or eight years collecting stones from around the world (including Russia, France, Italy, Afghanistan, Uruguay, Egypt, China, etc.) that look like portraits or human faces. To date, he has collected thousands of portrait stones of all shapes and sizes, and for him, they are sculptures, but also part of his artistic practice.

The initial inspiration for this crazy idea came from a solo drive he made from Beijing to Paris in 2015. While on the road, he passed through several countries on the Eurasian continent and encountered people from many ethnicities. One day, he noticed strange stones of different types and was surprised to discover that they looked like people; they seemed to have their own attributes, personalities, and fates. In that moment, these primeval objects were like a divine revelation that immediately brought him back to life. Since then, Wang has thrown all of his energy into this project. Apocalypse, the first solo show for this body of work, was held at Long March Space in 2016. Six years later, Tang Contemporary Art is presenting the second solo exhibition for this project—also named Apocalypse, because the transcendent power is eternal.

We cannot ascertain when these stones from all over the world were formed, and we have no way of knowing how they have changed with the shifts in climate, geography, and culture that have taken place over billions of years. For Wang Sishun, these wonderful stones are the products of the will of nature, rather than miracles. In the late nineteenth century, primitive art and its unrefined qualities were discovered and widely incorporated by modern artists. In the twentieth century, this became a trend that deeply influenced a huge number of European and American artists. In particular, when Jean-Hubert Martin curated Magiciens de la Terre at the Centre Pompidou in 1989, primitive or indigenous art gained a new profile and became a new political force, due to the end of the Cold War and the advent of globalisation. Of course, all of this has benefitted from the inventions of ‘prehistory’ in the late nineteenth century. As art historian Maria Stavrinaki has written, in a time of technological progress, increased production, and accelerated movement, three narratives about time formed in the West. One after another, these new research areas delved deep into the hazy vastness of the past: First, they estimated the age of the Earth, then they traced the emergence of humans, and finally, they considered when art began. These temporal narratives cannot be separated from the destructive forces of modernity. When Aby Warburg studied images of Pueblo lands, he keenly noted how modern technologies (such as electricity) had damaged the lives and belief systems of indigenous peoples.

In the end, all of this is still the product of modern society. The rationality of enlightenment evidently cannot encompass its complexity; it always develops within the complicated dialectical relationships between fast and slow, change and eternity, faith and doubt, progress and decline, rationality and insanity. However, for Wang, these stone portraits carved by natural forces and universal time have already transcended this dialectical logic. He is creating—or more precisely, participating in the creation of—an eternal super-species that is greater than humanity and all of the species on Earth.

– Lu Mingjun