We are honored to announce the opening of Wang Lijun’s first solo exhibition at Beijing Commune, “Wang Lijun: Tension”, on June 11, 2021. In the context of post-pandemic, while the everydayness that we live by reemerges as a worth thinking issue, as well as our anxious longing for a so-called “balanced life”, it is within this new series brought by artist Wang Lijun that a broader sense of interpretation lies in. As Wang Lijun himself said, “if seeking for balance means to thrive for a seemingly natural state in a context grounded in pure artificiality, then, the sculpture itself could be seen as a precise representation of such means of artificial tension.”
In this exhibition, artist Wang Lijun’s artistic practice is reflected in his continuous focus on investigating the interrelations between the artist’s self-ego, the materiality, and the physical space that surrounds the former. To be more precise, the medium specificity embedded in the tangible material that Wang Lijun utilizes, as in how the imbricated wood grains of artificial plywood are in a dissonant yet compatible relationship with natural wood, carries out an unperceivable yet essential feature that helps in redefining the philosophical dialectics that Wang Lijun finds in everyday life.
As the departure point of the artist’s practice, the concept of “self” is also the thesis to which this series eventually returns. When “Self-balancing” and “Self-proving” present the sense of balance at ground level, “Self-weighing” and “Self-existing” forms another means of tension by further stretching the plywood, in contrast to the camphorwood, in a multi-dimensional way. In “Self-suspending”, supported by the cedarwood as well as the steel wire rope, two pieces of plywood are closely connected yet partly disconnected. This form of suspension resonates with that found in “Self-reflecting”, in which two disconnected pieces of wood, with one dissected from the other, are seen amid holding the balance as well. What seems to be echoing with those, is yet put in sharp contrast to them, is the “Monologue” placed in the back of the room. It is not simply the white plaster, the white plywood, nor neither the iron wire that connects the former, that is shaped into the emulations, but rather the very intention in achieving the artificial balance itself.
Grounded in the materiality of mediums while driven by layers of temporal, spatial and physical concepts, what this exhibition seeks to show is not simply the physical means of tension formulated by sculptures, nor neither an instinctive portrait of the everyday life in the age of post-pandemic, but a constant and critical contemplation on our anxious longing for the idea of balance itself.
