For everything endowed to human being,
I want to taste in my heart.
----- Faust

In Heidegger's time dimension flowing from the future to the past, death has a profound and aggressive meaning. A person can only experience his real existence in a private experience. The preexistent consciousness of death urges people to pursue the infinite transcendence in the finite default of life. Suicide is initiated by an active decision to end life, but in the sense of existentialism, it is a positive understanding and plan of one's viability.

When the Chinese modern art plunged into all kinds of metaphysical meditations, Wei Guangqing did such an artwork, which is quite existentialism. The plan is composed of two parts, which are literal statements and the implementations of scenes. In my understanding, the former is not the real plan of the latter, as the latter is not the real implementation of the former. They belong to two artificial situations: word and event. Only the point of the suicide experience keeps the dramatic relations between them. "Oneness", the definitive, is true for all of us—if you are a active participant. From appetite to sex, from the weightlessness of space to the fear of time, all of the experiences are surrounded by the concrete, physical event of "suicide" as the starting point. The white background and the Red Cross not only make the event dramatic, but also keep the "simulated event " at a slight distance from real event. Actually, people couldn't recognize his own real existence, even in the experiences of pain and death, because saying that the finite and sensitive person could experience the transcendent and infinite existence such as beauty is no less than a paradox. Despite all that, the introspection of the conflicts between life and death, between finite and infinite, there is still a positive manner that people can affirm themselves.

In the contemporary youth art world, Wei Guangqing belongs to the experimenters who are calm and have the vital energy to explore. Compared to his previous works, the oil paintings which emphasize the expression of idea (Secrete Ceremony) and the use of material language (Hurt series), this time he pays more attention to experience the particular physical events, which are more related to our daily lives. I think this experiment will calm down the metaphysical dignity, the aloof, and the proud emotions of the heroic era. Wei Guangqing's sentence would be helpful to all of us:

"Performance permits continuous play. The key is experience."


October 1988

Edited by Lin Sophia Ma, September 2007