Urban Landscape
Urban landscape 2002-2006
Artificial truth
The spectacular landscapes of Zhan Wang are made of thousands of stainless steel utensils, conveying the contradiction and confrontation existing between tradition and development. The materials employed for new buildings are changing China’s “Landscape,” which seems to have become the road of China’s development and life. It seems that the hard stainless steel cutlery will replace the traditional and fragile porcelain. For Zhan Wang, the never-rusting stainless steel is a symbol of the luxury of material life and of people’s eternal desires. At the same time, the urban landscape also reflects the artist’s dream to enter into a Chinese traditional landscape painting. Visitors can walk around the valleys and the cities made of stainless steel, with the smoke curling upwards.
Francesco·Bonami: “Universal Experience: Art, Life and the Tourist’s Eye”
About "Landscape Meal"
As a person living in a contemporary Asian city, you get a taste of the city’s changes every day, especially of the strong contrast existing between the new architecture and traditional culture. But now, I realize that it is not my long-term concern for these changes that has enriched my thoughts, but it is the more and more rapid speed of construction which is almost mandatory that has always captured and filled my vision, as a brilliant and violent storm far from the end.
When you bump into a booth selling tableware, you will find that stainless steel utensils have already systematically replaced or copied all the ceramic tableware we have used since ancient times. Those piles of stainless steel utensils assembled together are like new cities, which radiate with the light of the material they are made of…...
If the stainless steel rockeries which I make are a reproduction of traditional culture, then stainless steel utensils can be regarded as the modern reproduction of traditional cutlery. They have a common characteristic, that is, both of them change and re-interpret our life through the transformation of a material, so that we have to accept the notion of modern life shaped by new materials.
Immortals have always been a peculiar trait of Eastern cultures. If combined together with our common life, these two extremes, immortality and eating, will integrate together, showing us the real face of life nowadays. This landscape (the city) is not the traditional landscape painted by scholars. It shows us the existence of other dreams and illusions.
Zhan Wang
2003 Edited version