Artist news | Fu Wenjun photo-video installation on view at Shanghai Himalayas Museum

From May 12th to May 27th 2020, Fu Wenjun’s large-scale photo-video installation “Post-Industrial Era” is on view at Shanghai Himalayas Museum at the group exhibition “Witness to Reality -Photography Exhibition of Old Industrial Base and Three-Line Construction”. Shanghai Himalayas Museum is the second stop of the project that is financed by China National Arts Fund and first showed at Chongqing Art Museum in December 2019.

The exhibition is divided into two sections:”Old Industrial Base” and “Three-line Construction”. The works displaying at the first section manifest the changes of Chinese old industrial bases from the past to the present. The images invite the audience to touch the truth deeply buried in the historical memory, with diverse and personal photographic language using by different artists.

There are a large number of works in the”three-line construction” section. Artists use cameras to interpretand reflect on industrialization, and meet the challenges of images in the iterative evolution of technology.

In this section, you will find Fu Wenjun’s work “Post-Industrial Era”, a large-scale photo-video installation, which presents artist’s reflection on the questions related to the industrialization and digitalization from the past, to the present and the future.

The work was created in 2015. Then it was exhibited at Guangdong Museum of Art “1st Asia Biennial and 5th GuangzhouTriennial” and at National Art Museum of China solo show “Harmony in Diversity: Fu Wenjun’s Digital Pictorial Photography” in 2017.

Here is the artist statement about the work:“The project begins with my thinking on the famous sketch Uomo vitruviano of Leonardo Da Vinci. It is known that with Uomo Vitruviano, the Master tried to create a ‘perfectly proportioned’ male body on the base of the golden ratio.The golden ration that can apply to nearly all art forms and architecture represents the product of pure rational analysis. It is the enlightenment on rationality that brings the Industrial Revolution. The conceptual photography works are presented by mounting on the worn-out locomotive wheels. Why the works are mounted on the round wheels? Firstly, by imitating the square and round background of Uomo Vitruviano, I query if the industrialization process also has its own golden ratio. If has, should the industrialization process respect the scales/principals? Secondly, I think the wheels are the recorder of time and space. This art project is my reflections on the industrial civilization. According to the image plane layout, I stick the real circuit boards on the abstraction factory photos. Presenting the art project becomes a process, a transformation from industrialization to digitalization; a very small chip can contain a great quantity of information, which can be true or false, good or bad, just like the industrialization process: ugliness along with greatness. Besides, the back of the wheels are equipped with LED projectors, projecting the moving images of the changes from handicraft age, industrial age to the post-industrial age, which reflect Asia’s unique civilization and industrialization process, and the temporal and spatial links between Asia and the starting point of Western industrial civilization.”