Wang Tuo Wins Prestigious Sigg Prize 2023
Wang was one of six artists from Greater China who exhibited at M+ in Hong Kong as part of the prize.
Wang Tuo with his work at the Sigg Prize 2023 exhibition. Courtesy M+, Hong Kong. Photo: Dan Leung.
M+ announced Wang Tuo the winner of the Sigg Prize 2023 in Hong Kong today. The HK $500,000 (U.S. $64,000) prize was established by M+ in 2018 as an evolution of the Chinese Contemporary Art Award, which was founded by Dr Uli Sigg in China in 1998.
Works by Wang and the other shortlisted artists—Jes Fan, Miao Ying, Xie Nanxing, Trevor Yeung, and Yu Ji—can be viewed at the Sigg Prize 2023 exhibition, which continues at M+ until 14 January 2024.
Congratulations on your win! What does the prize mean to you?
It's a great opportunity to show my works and to exchange thoughts with other artists. You feel happy when people stand by your side, people encourage you, because you're on a very lonely road making art. But then after this short happiness, you will just get back to what you really are and you go back to your regular life and art making. Winning something is not the goal of making art.
What is the goal of making art for you?
At the very beginning, it was about my personal interests. And then I found out more about how society works, and you just want to try to solve some problems. Maybe it's something you're doing in vain, it's not something you can really solve, but during this process you get to know yourself more and you get to know your surroundings more. You want to criticise, you want to reflect, and you want to be an inspiration for others, because you always gain inspiration from others.
For the Sigg Prize Exhibition at M+ you're presenting four video works that you call The Northeast Tetralogy (2017–2021). What did you want to accomplish with the project?
The starting point was my hometown, Changchun, in Northeast China. But it's not just about my hometown—It's about rethinking the reality in China through my experiences in my hometown.
The narrative of this project is communicated through several characters or historical figures and historical moments which speak to the dilemma we're facing right now in China, or even across East Asia: the failure or the Enlightenment movement from over 100 years ago.
You use the language of cinema in your works. What makes them artworks and not films?
The language of film is something people can access easily because people already have a whole history of watching films. But actually the aim is to fight against this medium. Films provide direct information, but video installations create a system of questions to think about or reflect on.
There's an influencer who sells products worth billions of RMB every year, but last year his stream was cut off instantly. This is something like art because it just provided questions. It didn't give you information directly [about political history]. The influencer's audience is from the younger generation, a lot of whom don't know about this part of history, but they started to do their own research into it. So this is the art, you know. When you're reading a Wikipedia page you get the information directly, but his disappearance created a system of questions.
Is there one scene from the Northeast Tetralogy that you think is especially important or successful?
There's a scene in the third video, Tungus (2021), where a group of young scholars from the May Fourth Movement in 1919 slowly turn their heads and look into the camera. I saw a photograph taken by a foreign journalist in Beijing at that time and when I looked at it I was shocked, I felt penetrated by their glance from 100 years ago. It's like they're asking questions to the future. Did the movement succeed? Or did their efforts and their sacrifice become something more like a nightmare?
This is a tough question, because you're going to want to be very diplomatic and very fair, but I want you to be very undiplomatic and unfair. Looking at the other artists shortlisted for the Sigg Prize this year, who really interests, inspires, or influences you?
To be diplomatic, I think I love them all. They have all gone very deep into their own practice, their own direction. And they've all developed their own vocabulary and system of understanding the world. But personally, I've known Xie Nanxing for quite a long time and because he's also based in Beijing and I think from his practice I have a lot of inspiration. Not just as a painter, you know, he's a painter (I am myself a painter) but it's not about the medium itself, it's about how you treat your art. He's a really brave artist. He challenges himself a lot. —[O]
