Wang Sishun
Truth
September 15–October 17, 2015
Opening: September 15, 6–9pm
New Galerie
2 rue Borda
75009 Paris
Wang Sishun is an emblematic figure of the new generation of contemporary artists from mainland China. Born in 1979, he lives and works in Beijing. His approach is at once conceptual and invested in the creation of objects that would easily be classified as sculpture and installation. (He also expresses himself through video and photography.) His playful and experimental approach is accompanied by a protocol that makes the creative process remain on equal footing with the plastic qualities of the final work. Wang Sishun’s first exhibition in Paris, Truth at New Galerie received the generous support of the John Dodelande Collection. The artist has made a six-week journey from Beijing to Paris in order to bring us a flame that survived a devastating fire, a relic that Wang Sishun has turned into a work of art. Negative energy has been converted into an initiative that transforms and changes the object into a vector of thought whose transhumance has made both its iconic and symbolic potential more dynamic. To keep the flame lit in a lamp that will become, once safely arrived, the exemplary fire and paradigm of a Promethean action, the artist has traveled 7,500 miles, a rally worthy of a modern-day Marco Polo.
The artist has thus found the best way to export the fire, the original primordial raw material and heir to a cataclysmic upheaval, and bring it into contact with a ton of different landscapes and cultures. After all, fire implies as many varied and divergent interpretations as crossings of longitudes and parallels followed.
Wang Sishun’s attitude inserts a significant margin of vitality and questioning into the picture. The flame in itself is small, but its influence is huge thanks to the heat and energy it provides. Entitled Truth, this project generates a sense of faith and belief in the truth of life.
The lamp will have multiple copies, with an unlimited edition that can be acquired by anyone who wishes. Still, they each will remain a unique work, as the flame it protects is alive and, by its very nature, changes endlessly.
There is in this project all the elements of an epic. Like Prometheus, Wang Sishun seized the fire to give it. Like Ulysses, the artist crossed distant lands and, through his odyssey, has become a contemporary hero, one who has authored of a total work of art carrying a universal message to the attention of a humanity that must intelligently master its own nature, like an immutable truth.
–Ami Barak, July 2015