Although time has made it possible to enlarge the freedom span of art thinking. There are still lots of obstacles confronting contemporary chinese art. Nowadays, Concepts about art are strongly restricted and disturbed by at least two factors: the traditional cultural pattern which has got a stable internal structure, and the urban civilization that has been changing opportunistically. Like a coin that gets only two sides, they provide artists in their sence and knowledge with no alternative.

All we could say is that contemporary Chinese art needs to respond. This reality has left those who are tired with excuses for escape and conformity. To the wise, it also makes a chance for Chinese art to develop its contemporary characteristics. Out of a soil of mixed state, might come a new source for art thinking. What Weihua Ni and Nanming Wang have done in the past few years is just an effort to seek in response a corresponding pattern of art that goes in opposition to reality.

With help of computer and printing provided by modern civilization, Weihua Ni has wedged in the starting point of his works, the Continuously Spreading Event——another“characters series”, the concept of spreading, through production, reproduction, installation and other acts of spreading, turned the concept of spreading into entity. This work of Weihua Ni not only implies the visual expression of the world today, but also reveals a truth which is real of our living reality:large quantities of reproduction and apreading could make anything a irreversible event.

Obviously, corresponding to a culture matured both in rules and in types is difficult. Artists are easily to be trapped into wholeness. Nanming Wang touches with redeeming piety the acts of writing in the course of continuous writing and continuous breaking of the writing results, launches a profound denouncement at the conservative characteristic of traditional culture. While peeling of the original connotation of it, he has transformed the media of calligraphy into the vehicle of individual concept. His art has both the momentum of concept and the outstanding visual features. Logically, his work has not been complete for the present, and his sober negative sense has paved a clear way for his next step of art production. Meanwhile, his art once more suggests the effort made by many Chinese artists:“instilling”concept into certain kind of taken-for-granted material, and transform it into a new art media.

Ni and Wang’s arts have quite strongly ecpressed the subject of the ’90s Chinese art: contemporariness represented by directness.

Aug.1992  beijing