WANG TUO

Wang Tuo’s art is often likened to a maze, and rightly so. His multimedia works map the paths of lives both real and hallucinatory, branching into absurdist dramas that, through their sinuous timelinese and deeply felt politics, end up at new places to begin. The five videos viewable in Wang Tuo’s current online exhibition at White Space, Beijing, thrust a cast of characters into specific historical situations while placing history itself into an unorthodox narrative structure. Here, Wang Tuo outlines his recent work and upcoming plans. “Standing at the Crossroads” opened online on April 30 and continues through June 6, 2020.

My current show takes its title from a letter that the modernist poet and critic Lu Xun wrote in 1925 addressing the young people of China; although it appears to refer to our crisscrossed, contradictory present, I prefer to see it as a word of advice for artists and other creative minds alike. The “crossroads” to which Lu refers don’t mean the wrong paths, merely divergent ones. Crossroads signal a kind of choice. I hope to stand at these crossroads without forming hasty judgments about my surroundings, and to look at things alongside the course of time—to observe the objects of my gaze with a certain distance, with room both to go left and right, and to think a while longer.

Wang Tuo, Symptomatic Silence of Complicit Forgetting, 2019 single-channel 4K video, color, sound, 26 minutes 15 seconds. Courtesy the artist.

Early on in my career, I did performance art. We usually think of performance as having to do with exploring the boundaries of the body. For me, performance is a kind of action, a process involving manipulation; the object or material of this manipulation might be the body, or an archive, an event, a person’s experience or memory. Action is the essence of performance, and that’s why I see this sense of performativity as the internal driving force of all my artworks...READ MORE