He searches for new possibilities of material language in his artworks, considering the nature of space and time.

Since the 1990s, Wang Jianwei has been exploring the influence of knowledge synthesis and interdisciplinarity on contemporary art, experimenting with the methodologies of different disciplines to create a new artistic language, and practicing an interdisciplinary way of viewing the world through philosophical questioning. His art crosses diverse artistic mediums, including film, theatre, multi-media, public art, painting, etc.

He searches for new possibilities of material language in his artworks, considering the nature of space and time.

Wang Jianwei's Cambrian series embodies the artist’s multi-faceted reflections on geological energy, overcapacity, and economic expansion, colliding with each other to create new geopolitical relationships. Electronic chips generate the cold realist landscapes, and the sharp stainless steel installation adopts minerals of the Cambrian strata. The engine turbines trace back to crude oil in shale formations. Wang takes the Cambrian, a dormant geological time, as his starting point, who doesn’t consider this geological time as part of the science, but the residual knowledge between the vertical and horizontal.

For "Advent," a group exhibition of contemporary art presented at Qiaoshaobay on Chongming Island, Shanghai, Wang Jianwei's installation Nickel, Nature, and the Environment was found on the lawn by the river. It visualized the ancient element nickel, creating a connection with nature and the environment while introducing a new mode of thinking to human beings.

Wang Jianwei's attention paid to public space began with his video work Production in 1996. He observed a teahouse that historian Wang Di described as "a confrontation between local culture and national culture in public life." This work marked the first 60-minute video feature by a Chinese artist, which implied the artist had found a way to produce art in public space. Production is a continuous video documentation of the private space formed by the dialogue between people in eight teahouses, revealing the living spaces constructed from the power structure and public relations in the traditional grassroots organizations.

Wang Jianwei's two exhibitions, "Time Temple" and "Dirty Substance," offer in-depth exposures to the artist’s thoughts on "things." He tends to consider people to come into contact with the mediums of things. Like when we speak about a person, a thing, or nature, society, we are not faced with the thing itself, but processing knowledge about them. Then, an artist's work is to recede behind the façade of knowledge, to the thing itself. We no longer need to assign objects any meaning, but the object itself begins to function and produce its own form with its own density, mode of movement, and other properties. In particular, the installations in "Time Temple" have realized this process; the objects produced their own form at this time.

Wang Jianwei

Wang Jianwei has been interested in the pre-established functions of a space since Production (1997); this piece was the primary work of his first attempts at video-recorded art. Production was a selective documentative record of the intra-group relationships which take place in public spaces across all areas of Sichuan Province, inquiring into the private space of conversation within a public space of the teahouse. The video recording Life Elsewhere (1998-1999) similarly possessed documentative qualities in its attempt to take social issues and phenomena and situate them in an expanded domain of observation. Wang Jianwei resists utilizing solely one means by which to express the integrity of relationships and thoughts, this can be seen a key aspect of his visual language. In Screen (2000), Wang Jianwei for the first time used theatrical performance to act out the scene of the painting The Banquet of Han Xizai by the Five Dynasties’ painter Gu Hong, and in the later work Flying Bird is Motionless (2005) once again worked using theatre and rehearsal to elucidate his personal interpretation on time and the contemporary. Human Quality (2008), uses an extremely tense 32-minute recording to reconstruct communal life during China’s Cultural Revolution, a conceptual project which linked together all experiences of history, utopias, symbols and influences utilizing video, photographs, and sculptural installations amongst other media as a means of questioning and experimentation. “Rehearsal” for Wang Jianwei is the focal avenue through which he consults reality and history, and though many of Wang Jianwei’s works are founded in the experience of Chinese society, they are much more focused on a globalised and universal dimension, such as in his video and performance work Welcome to the Desert of the Real (2010).

In 2011 Wang Jianwei held a solo-exhibition “Yellow Signal” at the Ullens Center for Contemporary Art and in 2013 held a solo-exhibition at Long March Space titled “……..” 2014-2015 he held a solo-exhibition at the Guggenheim Museum in New York “Time Temple” followed by the 2015 “Dirty Substance” at Long March Space. No matter whether installation or paintings, both progressively take form through unknown active forms, just as the medium of rehearsal, with the dialogue and contradictions amongst works in diverse media themselves can be seen as the launch of a rehearsal.