Wang Bing Dossier 2024

Wang Bing
Wang Bing à la trace
Université Rennes 2, Galerie Art et Essai, Rennes, France
January 14th — February 26th, 2022

This exhibition will present some of the most significant works by Wang Bing, with for instance, Man With No Name, 15 Hours and Beauty Lives in Freedom. First shown in 2018 at Galerie Chantal Crousel, the film Beauty Lives in Freedom tells the story of the Chinese artist, philosopher, and poet Gao Ertai and his lifelong pursuit of freedom for more than half a century.

These works attest to the living and working conditions of an entire neglected fringe of the Chinese people, both past and present, in a historical and anthropological way.

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WANG BING – THE WALKING EYE
07.01 — 06.02.2022
Photographic Centre, Geneva, Switzerland

Unveiled from May to November 2021 at LE BAL (Paris), the exhibition entitled Wang Bing, l’œil qui marche is presented for the first time in Switzerland in the context of the 23rd edition of the Black Movie International Independent Film Festival Geneva and adapted for the CPG exhibition space by the two Genevan teams.

Based on a selection of sequences from Wang Bing's films, the exhibition, conceived as a "general installation", allows visitors to experience the documentary and plasticity of Wang Bing's cinematographic œuvre. The exhibition proposes a journey through Wang Bing’s works which themselves map out a peculiar journey through China, tormented by the major questions this country must face in the 21st century: human under constant threat, the dissolution of last century’s large industrial complexes, confinement, forced and closely surveilled migration, the body’s submission to the expectations and demands of the labor market. This physical experience recreates the apprehension of the people to whom the filmmaker is stubbornly attached, characters crossing territories undergoing profound industrial and natural changes, characters on the run or cloistered, but resistant in their survival and in their search of unknown horizons.

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Wang Bing
December 8th, 2018 — February 3rd, 2019
Kunsthalle Zürich - Zürich — Switzerland

At Kunsthalle Zürich, Bing will be presenting two films: Mrs. Fang, (Fang Xiu Ying, 102 min. 2018, Golden Leopard 2017 for the cinema version) and Man with No Name (Wu Ming Zhe, 99 min., 2010). Both films focus on a single individual and that person’s fragile physicality. Bing follows Mrs. Fang and the man with no name with great immediacy and tenacious respect. Bing’s films are characterized by a careful intimacy, yet they are also committed to a hard realism. Among what has resulted from this approach are these two portraits that educate as well as challenge us.

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Wang Bing
Hito Steyerl - Ben Rivers - Wang Bing
March 24th — May 27th, 2018
EYE Filmmuseum - Amsterdam — Netherlands

The Eye Art & Film Prize rewards artists, filmmakers and artist-filmmakers working in the disputed space between cinema and the visual arts. In challenging the conventions separating one discipline from the other, this exhibition of the first three recipients of the prize – Wang Bing, Ben Rivers and Hito Steyerl – also undermines the boundaries between art and politics, documentary and fiction, the real world and the represented.

That it is possible to identify shared themes in the work of these artists – who have little in common beyond having been awarded the same prize – only illustrates how shared concerns about the world in which we live shape the most important art of our time. Chief among them is an anxiety about the transmission of truth, the insecurity of which lurks behind the work of all three. The Eye Filmmuseum presents a selection of their films and videos in its exhibition spaces, each work sympathetically installed in a room of its own.

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Wang Bing
December 1st — 22nd, 2018

On the occasion of Wang Bing’s second exhibition, Galerie Chantal Crousel will present three films including two previously unseen in France: Mrs Fang (2018 – Director’s cut) and Beauty Lives in Freedom (2018) respectively shown at 11am and 2pm from Tuesday to Saturday. Traces (2014) will be presented in the exhibition space in a continuous screening.
 
Mrs Fang (Director’s cut - 1h42)
Fang Xiuying was a farm worker born in Huzhou, Fujian in 1948. For the last eight years of her life she suffered from Alzheimer’s. By 2015 the symptoms were quite advanced. She received an ineffective treatment in a convalescent home and few months later she returned home to die.

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Man in Black, Wang Bing’s 2023 film examines the life of Chinese composer Wang Xilin. "My intention in this short film is to exhibit the body and soul of a man scarred by a life of suffering, a “man in black” who is yet still capable of expressing a deep and sincere compassion; and with excerpts from his Symphonies, to revisit some of the horrifying real-life historical events that he has lived through and that still live on in his memory as testimony to an era that saw the dehumanisation of the entire Chinese nation." – Wang Bing, December 2021

Xilin was born in 1936 in Kaifeng, Henan Province, and now shares his time between Mainz (Germany) and Beijing. His musical gifts were nurtured from an early age at the missionary-run Chengguang primary school in Pingliang, Gansu, where he spent his childhood and adolescence. In September 1949, due to difficult family circumstances after his father’s early death, he joined the theatre troupe of the People’s Liberation Army (PLA)’s 11th Division. On graduating from college in 1957, he was admitted to the composition department of the Shanghai Conservatory of Music. Upon graduating he was then assigned to the post of resident composer for the Beijing Central Broadcasting Corporation Symphony Orchestra and by 1963 he had completed his symphonic suite, his “Yunnan Tone Poem” (Op. 3). This was later awarded the highest prize given by the Chinese government.

Wang Xilin is a key figure in the contemporary music of the People’s Republic of China. His career resembles a pile of mirror shards, and his music reflects this painful path directly and powerfully. The turmoil and persecution during the Cultural Revolution and the complete isolation from Western music made it impossible for his generation to pursue their own ideas and aesthetic approaches and critically engage with tradition. They saw their promising careers abruptly and permanently interrupted by forced evacuations, labor camps or exile. The deep wounds that the Cultural Revolution inflicted on writers and musicians left lasting traces. In the decades following its end, they found artistic expression in the so-called “scar literature” or “scar music”. Wang Xilin’s music in particular reflects these tragic circumstances. After his return, he dared to make a fundamentally new beginning in composition, regardless of the many years he had lost, and tried to give the suffering of his people a voice in his music: “I [...] point to the crimes straightforwardly, because I myself experienced the oppressive reality as a heavy burden” (epilogue to the 3rd Symphony, 1990).
– A Genuine Voice from China – Wang Xilin: Chronicler against the Power

by Britta Schilling-Wang, musicologist, the editor of the German MMG Music Dictionary and author of Wang Xilin’s entry in volume 17

15 Hours is shot in a centralized garment processing facility consisting of 18 000 small production units employing a total of around 300 000 migrant workers. They start work every day at 8 am, break from 11 to 12 for a lunch of beef and rice, then work from 12 to 5, and again after dinner through to 11 pm. The migrant workers usually also work on Saturdays and Sundays. Pay is on a piecework basis. Every worker, like every machine, works at top speed. The entire 15-hr film is shot on a digital HD camera as a single long take, starting at 8 am on the first day and following one group of workers until they clock off at night, faithfully recording their life and work through a day.  

In 2005, while doing preparatory work on his film, The Ditch (2010), Wang Bing travelled to the Gobi Desert, to the exact same places where thousands of people lived and died in the “reeducation-through-labour” camps set up by the communist regime in the late fifties. He shot the site with a 35 mm camera for about one hour, with scenes of desert and abandoned bones – a landscape doomed to disappear. Now digitized and revised, these images provide excellent evidence of the events of those times, which have been virtually buried until now. 

For several days, Wang Bing filmed and photographed the daily life of Mr. Cai, who left the countryside to work as a stonemason in a factory in the city of Fuming, in the province of Yunnan. His two sons have joined him and the three of them live in a four square-meter room, containing only one bed and an oven. At night, the father goes to work and leaves the bed to his sons. 

The West of China used to be the poorest region in the country, consisting mostly of the Gobi Desert and a hilly landscape. Today this region relies on oil exports, coal and metal ores for its income. Mined areas are constantly expanding and at an accelerating speed; the Gobi Desert and its adverse natural climate proves no match to the power of man and machine. The film was shot at a high altitude and shows heavy industry crude oil extraction and the tiring and dirty work of labourers over long days. Wang Bing follows the workers in their canteens and dormitories, while they play cards and talk about women and money.