Wang Jianwei's artwork Time Temple is inspired by quantum physics
Artist's pieces reflect theories of "potential of time"
Art and science often make uneasy bedfellows, but that's not the case for Chinese artist Wang Jianwei. His works, which are conceptual and highly theoretical, have their foundations in theoretical physics, specifically the ideas of Danish physicist Niels Bohr, one of the scientists who established the foundations of quantum mechanics.
Wang seeks to directly express some of the concepts of theoretical physics in his art.
His Time Temple, a composite work comprising paintings, sculptures, a live performance and a film, is showing at the Guggenheim Museum in New York, where Wang is the first artist to benefit from an ongoing programme by the Robert H.N. Ho Family Foundation to fully fund new Chinese contemporary art for the museum.
Sichuan-born Wang began his artistic career as a painter, studying at the Zhejiang Academy of Fine Arts (now the China Academy of Art) in Hangzhou in the mid-1980s. Encountering Western conceptual art and the works of Western philosophers such as Jean-Paul Sartre at the Academy, he started making video installations and later documentary films.
Emphasising his belief that an artist should not be limited by one artistic practice, Wang's Guggenheim show is conceived as a single work that exists in four media. Two paintings hang on the walls of the gallery. The larger is divided into four panels and depicts a group of people seated around a table, being hit with what may be a representation of beams of light. A second painting, in yellow and black, is a kind of cellular structure housed in a rigid architectural form.
A line of abstract wooden sculptures in jagged or cylindrical shapes guides the visitor through the gallery, and a film, a theatrical adaptation of Franz Kafka's 1915 novella The Metamorphosis, about a man who turns into a giant insect, screens in a theatre above. The final element, which takes place in the museum's giant rotunda, is a work of performance art which has chosen speakers riffing on set topics such as ancient Gnostic religions.