冯博一
在这个江湖混久了，百事摧心，万事劳形，多少有些麻木与迟钝。尤其是眼睁睁地看到江湖中的泥沙俱下，尔虞我诈，而与艺术本质的探索、实验、批判、自由精神愈来相去甚远。其乐何如？或许这是我近来较为关注年轻艺术家创作的潜在背景和心态。当我第一次见到艺术家王子和他的作品时，却有着眼前一亮是新人之感！这并不是说王子已具备了未来大艺术家的潜能，而是从他的状态、感觉，以及他对艺术的态度上，你能感受到一种未来中国当代艺术的拐点希望——没有现实与文化上的负累，没有急于出人头地的智慧，没有暧昧的庸俗，更没有谋略上的狡诈，一切都显得那么的自然流畅、透明清晰。他的从容与清纯会使我们红尘混久了之后，荡涤现实策略的晦暗，甚至有些无地自容的尴尬。
王子从清华美院毕业后的艺术创作是有关他成长经历的北京胡同。作为初期的创作，他尝试着将儿时的成长经验与记忆对应转化为当下文化情境的连接之处。其实，真正牵挂王子内心深处的不仅是外部世界，还有他的性别身份和情感归宿。他用一种含混、矛盾、但又温和的情绪与方式挑战不再明确的性别伦理和变得模糊的道德约束。在我最近策划的题为“潜活”的专题展览中，他创作了《图谱》、《标本》两件作品，在作品中异性恋被颠倒地看为带有病态的一群“恐同症”，而将同性恋当为一个正常的社会群体。
王子是一位擅于思考的年轻艺术家。他最近特别钟情于书籍和书籍形式的视觉研究。书籍是承载文化的主要媒介，其本身也成为传统文化有意味的一种形式与符号象征。王子与书籍的“较劲儿”是通过对书籍和书籍中刊载的图像挪用、拼贴与篡改来展开的。我饶有兴致地是他的《蒙娜丽莎》和《美术新编》作品。在《蒙娜丽莎》中，他将《马克思选集》、《列宁回忆录》等经典但有些枯燥的书籍，配上我们熟知的达•芬奇创作的经典名画——蒙娜丽莎的形象，再与中国大陆深入人心的公众形象互为结合，诸如摇滚歌星崔健、网络红人芙蓉姐姐、登月宇航员杨立伟等，还涉及到SARS、奥运等等社会现象和问题；在《美术新编》中，则是以中国当代活跃艺术家的作品作为素材，他利用扫描仪、计算机处理、拼接在一起，好像儿童拼搭LEGO积木。特别有趣的是当你仔细阅这部分作品时，你会发现每处细节都充满戏剧性的矛盾与冲突，强调了无解的存在。
而《美术新编》的黑白的图片包含有50年前的壮阳药物、抗美援朝的自杀式战争、民国的催眠术、气功等等毫无逻辑关系的小图，这些曾经存在并充满不确定的事物，可以看到一种图像的挪用和虚构，历史的诗意和现实的困境混杂在一起——一种超文本的戏仿效果。从图象到处理图像，不仅仅是对不同时期作品的审美趣味、样式的颠覆与破碎，也是拼贴与建构性的尝试，从而产生出一种新的视觉张力。这种张力的观念来自于他对艺术作品、美术史所形成的认知方式和叙事规则的反叛与挑战，在于对这种不合逻辑、非常理的荒诞现象的追问和给予荒谬结局的凸显，是在“互为图像”的关系上对原有创作意识和表述方式的拆解，抑或也是一种“荒谬之荒谬”的反诘。
作为要在荒谬的世界寻找意义，王子的创作超越了由文字构成的书籍，借助了图象的魅力，使抽象的文字获得了形象的造型，将文字的抽象性与造型的具像性相结合，将叙事的线性时间与造型的构图空间相结合，在文字与图象重构的并置中，通过补充、变形，甚至颠覆的倒错，创造出一种新的语意空间和生成一种新的视觉快感，从而构成了他这一系列作品的新视觉特征。把中外美术史的经典作品真实与虚构地并置在一起，使观者在开始审视作品时就意识到，他将要阅读的文本已不是传统意义上的视觉图像的美术史，而是经过他带有戏谑的整容后的历史。
After you have been in this circle for a while, you become insensitive and jaded. You look at the art circle is getting further and further away from the essence of art which is exploring, experimenting, criticizing, and free spirit and you do not do anything about it. That is why I have been paying more attention to the artistic potential and mentality of young artists. When I first saw artist Wang Zi and his works, I was surprised by his originality. This is not to say Wang Zi has the potential of a great artist, but you can see hope of Chinese modern art from his condition, feelings and attitudes for art. He does not have the burden of the reality and culture, neither does he have the wisdom to stand out as quickly as possible, the vulgarity of being oblique, or the guile in strategy. Everything looks so natural and transparent. His easiness and purity washes away the dirtiness in the reality and even makes us feel very embarrassed.
After Wang Zi graduated from Tsinghua University’s School of Art, his art works were about hutongs in the old town of Beijing where he grew up in. He attempted to transform his childhood experience and memory into links among contemporary cultural scenes. As a matter of fact, what Wang Zi is really concerned about are not hutongs, but his sexual orientation and love life. He uses a vague, contradictory, but amiable manner and mood to challenge gender ethics and moral restrictions that are not so clear-cut anymore. I included two if his works in the exhibition of “Underlying Words” I recently organized. They are “A Collection of Illustrative Plates” and “Specimen.” In “A Collection of Illustrative Plates,” he views heterosexuals as morbid and those who are afraid of the same sex and homosexuals as normal people. The piece presents us a new social construction in a manner of a game.
Wang Zi is a young artist who is good at thinking. He has been fond of books and the visual study of the form of books recently. Books are the main medium for spreading and carrying down the culture. They themselves are a form and symbol for traditional culture. Through playing with images in books, Wang Zi created art.I am rather interested in his “Mona Lisa” and “A New History of Art.” In “Mona Lisa,” he combines classic but boring books of ideology such as “Selective Works of Marks” and “Memoir of Lenin,” together with the image of Mona Lisa, as well as public figures people in mainland China are most familiar with such as rock star Cui Jian. He also touches on such public events as the outbreak of SARS and the Olympics. In “A New History of Art,” he uses works of Chinese modern artists as materials and makes collages out of them, which look like children’s LEGO games. What is interesting is when you carefully read this work, you will find there is dramatic contradiction and confrontation in every detail.
The black and white pictures include some small pictures portraying viagra of the 1950s, the suicidal Korean War, and hypnotism in the Republic Era. These things once existed but we are not too sure about their existence. They are a combination of the fiction of images, the poetic quality of history and the dilemma of the reality. All these are beyond text. From image to the processing of image, Wang Zi not only overthrows the aesthetic and form of art from different eras, but also tries to reconstruct something, in order to produce a new visual tension. The idea of the tension is from his understanding of art and the history of art and his rebellion from and challenge of the rule of narration. He deconstructs the original ideology and artistic expression by challenging the illogical and abnormal absurdity by using an absurd expression himself. 
To look for meaning in the world of absurdity, Wang Zi’s creation has gone beyond books of words. He borrows from the charm of images to give abstract words vivid images. He combines the abstractness of words and the concreteness of images, joins the lineal time of narrative and the structural space of design. He creates a new narrative space and visual excitement through the efforts, which is the new visual feature of this series of his works. By putting classic pieces of Chinese and foreign in a real and imagined way, he makes the viewers realize when they view the works that he/she is reading is not the traditional art history, but rather an art history joked with and manipulated by him.

开幕时间：2008年9月27日15：00
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地址：北京朝阳区酒仙桥路4号798工厂内大山子艺术区百年印象摄影画廊

Opening time: Sep.27 ，2008  3:00pm
Exhibition time:Sep.27,2008 –Oct.24，2008
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DIRECTION: 798 PHOTO GALLERY