Megan Hines on Wei Xiaoguang’s Yes, but
“I feel like it supposed to be funny, in this moment, and I don’t really appreciate it.”
So professed Wei Xiaoguang’s high-pitched alter ego, spoken through a voice-modulating microphone, during the staged panel discussion that kicked off his exhibition Yes, but on May 13th at 205 Hudson Street.
“Well, it’s so hard to know in this kind of work, if these are actors, and there’s been a very complicated script….” responded fellow panel member Sara Shaoul.
But who are the actors and who wrote this complicated script? The exhibition space, rather than grounding this performance in the familiar, belied the challenge to inured expectations. Paintings leant against the wall, stretchers facing out, and the room was outfitted in recognizable panel or lecture accouterment. Microphones stood on a long table draped with a black tablecloth before a grid of chairs while a panel of three performers, one being Wei, employed the very same well-versed art speak with which its audience came prepared. Arriving as critics, those in attendance found their typical role hurled back at them. The viewers, at first unaware of their assigned role as performers, slowly caught on. The role of artist and audience, of object and subject continually flipped in this unanticipated standoff.
The panel, reversing the traditional flow of information from object to subject only to double back again, divulged the across-the-board performativity of art production, reception, and critique. It was a momentary and vertiginous beginning to the exhibition. Wei’s multi-person performance, rather than offering any sort of conceptual stronghold, perhaps a habituated institutional critique of the habituated art lecture, instead created an environment in which all in attendance were willingly or unwillingly implicated. How does one critique a performative critique of a non-performative performance? The mental gymnastics are the stuff of Charlie Kaufman. Malkovich, Malkovich, Malkovich, Malkovich?
The conclusion of the performance and installation of Wei’s paintings led further down the rabbit hole, providing no respite from the constructed madness. The seven works on view, which despite, or maybe because of, their masterful technique, further complicated the relationship of artwork to audience. Wei’s “Photoshop Realism,” as he calls it, participates in the ad-speak brand of imagery, but in the final product eschews the use of digital tools in favor of traditional (manual) painting techniques. In today’s world of image proliferation and the ensuing entropic slide towards an equalization of all values, the question remains where old-fashioned, hand-produced image creation fits. Technique, in this case, rather than mastering an “original,” that is, nature, masters a Photoshop creation—a copy in itself. Artists today, says Wei, are hunting for domesticated chickens in their own backyard, suggesting that unique creative enterprise or the locating of meaning are absurd propositions.
To wit—the painting 4D, which hung directly behind the panel table, depicts just what it promises, the characters “4” and “D” with movie poster pizzazz. But of course the painting as an object has no potential to participate in a theoretical fourth dimension, as the title suggests it might. Similarly, the flat plane of the canvas has no potential to participate in the third dimension, as Wei’s masterful manipulation of light and shadow visually suggests it might. The artist simultaneously points to painting’s triumphs and failings. He seems to be doling out promises he cannot keep.
His continued performance in the “real” panel confirms this impression. In answer to why he included a portrait of Nicolas Bourriaud along with himself in Untitled (Bourriaud and Wei), he responded flatly that Bourriaud looks nice. It seems implausible that the choice to paint the author of Relational Aesthetics, the greatest reconfiguration of art-audience relations in the last twenty years, in a self-portrait could be motivated by pleasing facial attributes. But Wei’s nearly obsessive rendering of the face seems to confirm his statement. Yet despite his obsession over technique, the artist claims he does not necessarily even like painting. As to painting’s possible function or value, no answers were forthcoming. In any case, in the arms race to have the last word, the audience found itself ultimately outgunned.