The Information Energy of Conceptual Art

To artist Wang Youshen, the concept of communication forms the foundation of both his career and his way of creating art. In the “China Avant-Garde” exhibition, held in 1989, his collaborative works with Yang Jun, entitled “√,” were based upon the basic information carrier of the media—the photographic images from news sources. In order to create a photo entitled Man’s Advertisement, Youshen used his camera, with tripod, to snap photos of Beijing’s Wang Fujing shopping district, one of the most famous tourist destinations in all of China. By taking one photo per minute, he randomly captured a diversity of images of unknowing people as the primary subject matter. Afterward, he enlarged hundreds of those photos, put them together, painted a huge “√” sign on top of them and covered them with a real court notice. Although such characteristics of social criticism are not commonly seen in Wang’s later works, the power of such images became a part of his characteristic style throughout his career. This style similarly made him into one of China’s most successful artists, always penetrating the surface layer of images.

Beginning with his work Washing Before and After My Grandmother Passed Away, from 1994, Wang Youshen soon formed a complete and distinctive style of image processing. In a series of photos in which family imagery is a key element, and where the picture formation procedure and the cleanout procedure are fully utilized, a certain reaction between all of these elements successfully puts these images into a state that integrates both harmony and contradiction. This particular combination and reaction fully symbolizes Wang’s distinctive style of conceptualism. Wang’s conceptualism is not only about the information found in the image itself, but also about the chemical procedures of the picture’s formation and about the cleanout process that enhances and transforms the information and the energy within the images. The artist later created Washing Within the Space—a darkroom space—which added a third dimension to his art.

In the “New Asian Art” show, held in Japan in 1995, Youshen incorporated both the three-dimensional element of his “Darkroom” series while clearly conveying the “anti-war” subject matter of his series, “Washing: 1941’s Deep Pit Buried Thousands of People in Datong.” He once again employed the procedures of picture formation and cleanout, meanwhile probing into the fading history and complexity of memory and oblivion.

In recent years, Youshen has begun, increasingly, to employ both photos from the news and various personal photographs in interpreting a series of diverse and important subjects. Through a myriad of characters and themes, his works incorporate the ideas of anywhere from family consciousness to the relationships between the natural world and the city, and also from the individual’s social identity to the potential pressures of behavioral standards in the information era. These elements all demonstrate the concerns of society, humanity and the history of Chinese conceptual art, which can, visually, be perceived in the works making up his “Washing” series.