Solo exhbition
September 15 – October 17
Opening reception: September 15, 6-9 pm
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 conceptual while investing in the creation of objects that would easily be classified as sculpture and installation. He also expresses himself through video or photography. His playful and experimental approach is accompanied generally by a protocol that makes the creative process remain on an equal footing with the plastic qualities of the final work. Truth at New Galerie is the first exhibition by Wang Sishun in Paris and received the generous support of the John Dodelande Collection. The artist has made a six weeks 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 of a cataclysmic upheaval, and to bring it into contact with a ton of different landscapes and cultures because 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 especially questioning into the picture. The flame in itself is small but its influence is huge because it inserts heat and energy. Entitled “Truth,” the project generates a sense of faith and belief in the truth of life.
The lamp as the object will have multiple copies with an unlimited edition that can be acquired by anyone wishing to, but they will still benefit from a completely unique work because 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 this odyssey has become a contemporary hero and author of a total work of art carrying a universal message to the attention of a humanity that has to intelligently master its own nature, like an immutable truth.
Ami Barak, July 2015
