Studies for an academic drawing of the silent majority 3, 2014

Wang Kai Chen  

Wang Kai Cheng, a young self-taught artist, offers a reflection on individual identity within a globalized society as it appears violently in China. Originally from Dongbei province, northeast China, he settled in Beijing and there experienced self-questioning in the anonymity of a megalopolis where the first question it asks is that of habitat.

Or live ? What surface does an artist have in an economy turned towards profit and whose interest in art seems diverted from the question of ethics and aesthetics?

“My Name Is Wang”, the title of the artist's proposal, immediately refers to the question of identity that arises in the distribution of surnames in China. How to identify with a name used by 92 million people? What are the origins of this name, of the very idea of family and genealogy? In a world where everyone seems historically and politically cut off from tradition and from their family history, how is it possible to rebuild the collective, the social, and the idea of trans-generational transmission.

The 1st part of the proposal consists of a 5m2 wall installation by Hukou. The Hukou is an identity card or rather provincial passport, residence card, which gives the right since Mao Zedong and still today to reside in a province determined either by birth or by socio-economic and therefore political decision. In particular, it makes it possible to control migration by forcing residents to stay or change their place of residence and therefore of work. This work refers to the demand for the right to move freely in China, which despite the reforms announced by the government in 2010, still remains subject to state control. Wang Kai Cheng joins here the supporters of free citizenship in China, inducing a reflection with the contemporary context of individual identity.

At the same time, under a second section entitled “Who's the first? He invites all people called Wang to send their photos in order to collect and exhibit all of Wang's 92 million in China. Work in process of which there will probably be no end, Wang Kai Cheng attempts to humanize and reconstruct the genealogical line linked to his name and to determine the origin of the 92 million people who constitute it.

In a different aesthetic, Wang Kai Cheng offers a game of form, material and correspondence through the work “Born to be burned”. Created from construction materials still in use in China, such as brick, the formal games offered highlight the relationship between tradition and modernity that occupied China at the start of the century. At a time when the government is hammering the public space for a return to tradition and a Chinese dream beyond communism, Wang Kai Cheng humorously proposes a general overhaul of the codes of traditional representation.