Solo Exhibition by Zhenghong Wang

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Zhenghong Wang

In my own artistic project I have integrated all these previous themes that emerged from experiments with wearable sculpture in (Western) contemporary art. In addition, I have included a Chinese traditional dimension. In a philosophical way, I found the resolution between body, object, and space in premodern ideas which can be traced back to Chinese medical and Daoist ideas of the human body as a landscape. Yet, the body as a landscape was primarily seen as an internal world of the body, as I theoretically discussed in Chapter 1. Through own my PhD art project, I have externalized this relationship, and crossed the border between the inner landscape of the body to space. This is not restricted to the art space or the public space, but to the cosmos as a whole. Although similar attempts of crossing borders between the small body of a wearer of jewellery and larger context of space can be discovered in artworks made by Calder and even Martinazzi, the depiction of the body as a landscape itself is a typical Chinese representation. Through this representation, I have broadened the context of contemporary art to a more global context.

This research, both academic and artistic, should be considered to be an important first step. Art jewellery deserves a more important place in the histories and theories of art than it is the case today. As I have shown, art jewellery pieces are wearable sculptures. The way they make connections between space, private space of the body of the wearer and the public space is unique, and deserves a much greater attention both from art scholars and established artists, not only in the West but also in China.