Another Kind of Happiness

------The Scene from Wang Kai’s Art Stance

By Zhang Qing

1. Center or Margin

Wang Kai describes himself as “more of an onlooker on the margins”, but I think otherwise.

He witnessed China’s turbulent ’85 New Wave of Art when he was a college student in Beijing, so in his veins runs the blood of radical intellectuals of 1980’s. Surprisingly, that quality has been expanding in his blood. Even though he has lived in Shanghai since 1989, his thought and action keep unchanged in that aspect. If every age has its cultural icon, Wang Kai preserves the precious specimen, so to speak. Why does he become one on the margins while he lives in the center of artistic trends for twenty years---either Beijing or Shanghai? The answer is that his heart refuses to follow the dramatic art circle to play games, and to fish for fame at the cost of his dream. A hero becomes a hero because he would not betray his heart to trade his ideal for wealth and compliment. By so, Wang Kai remains in the center of art. Why? There are two scenes for each artist, whatever age they are in, one is the inner world, the other the real battlefield. In the past twenty years, many artists have become heroes in the battlefield, but lost their inner palace. On the contrary, Wang Kai guards the light of art in his heart in solitary silence. I have to ask, is he in the center or on the margins?

2. What We Calls for is “Artist Thinker”

Wang Kai is called “An Artist Thinker” jokingly, and that’s a good definition for his art stance. In today’s China, the art production is like the rambling factories in the countries of Fu Jian, the exhibitions resemble the commodity market of Yiwu, and the art market has the chaos of the vegetable fair of Tong Chuan Road. We get to understand what is modern art when art is industrialized, systemized and standardized. When all revolutions end up in failure, China’s contemporary art reap both fame and wealth. Is that we expect? I think Wang Kai is one who stands alone by character, affected by nothing. He enjoys thinking, thinking and thinking in the shades. It reminds me of Churchill, who, in the dangerous chaos of the War II, broadcast to his people in his special tone in the end of his speech, “ Never, never, never give up.” In danger or in chaos, what we need most is thinking and courage. If our art loses thought and questions, stance and courage, can our glamorous art have the guts to call itself art? Is it not a kind of happiness when some one still takes it as his responsibility as art stance and thinking are absent?

3. Another Kind of Happiness

Wang Kai says, “it is a happiness to leave the old living space to imagine another one, to work in another space of memory.” Every one desires happiness, no matter he loves art or not. The universality of happiness has been described on and on by myth and temporal stories. Yet Wang Kai insists on imagining and experiencing it in another space. From it, he obtains varied sorts of memories, and weave them into new scene of the inward world, where happiness is made, breathed and linked.

Is there only one kind of happiness, or there is another one, or is it of varied forms? In the period of social transition, cultural aberration and economic unbalance, Wang Kai seems to be undergoing his intellectual transition. In the course of transition, which is like the change of seasons, people meet different kinds of happiness.

The life and art of Wang Kai are like a bubbling mountain spring, wandering and rhythmic. In the new marriage of art and capital, art becomes a beautiful new world, and artists also bloom overnight. Now in the face of happiness, let’s review Nietzsche’s remark “re-evaluate all values”. Wang Kai defines another kind of happiness with his glowing thinking.

Oct. 21, 2007

Shanghai