Wang Gongxin

Wang Gongxin (b. 1960, Beijing) is one of the earliest and most influential video artists in China, focusing on the transmission of ideas between the West and China, children and parents, the real and unreal. Originally trained as a painter in the socialist-realist style, Wang Gongxin saw video art for the first time during a stay in New York in the 1980s with his wife and fellow artist Lin Tianmiao.  Back in China, he became one of the driving forces in the avant-garde movement, turning his home, and later a corner of a relative’s restaurant, into a gallery where fellow artists could meet and show their work. Wang Gongxin’s conceptual videos explore the boundary between reality and its replicas by turning seemingly ordinary situations upside down, and inverting viewers’ expectations as well. As the critic Pi Li observes, Wang Gongxin’s work “doesn’t escape reality, but many of his pieces make reality just a little lighter.”

Wang Gongxin's work has been exhibited internationally, in such venues as SFMoMA in San Francisco, the Mori Art Museum in Japan, Tate Liverpool in the UK, Musée D'Art Contemporain de Lyon in France, the International Center for Photography in New York, and the Shanghai Art Museum in China.