Since time immemorial, Chinese scholars have drawn inspiration from the natural world—particularly the rocks and stones that have been shaped and reshaped by time and the elements, often resembling miniature mountains. These stones lie at the heart of artist Zhan Wang's artistic output.
"In 1995, I noticed a strange phenomenon on the streets of Beijing," the artist recalls. "In front of so many modern buildings, there were installations like the literati rockery that I used to climb in the parks when I was a child. It surprised me that we had imported Western architecture, but did not have contemporary artwork to show with this. It seemed that the rocks and stones were important to the Chinese people, but I didn't know why."
"I began to look into this matter, including the conceptual and philosophical origins of the stones, based in Taoism and the pursuit of nature. Usually, these are concepts seen in paintings—but the stones themselves can present the very essence of such a philosophy. Since 1995, I have concentrated on stones."
Today, the Beijing-based artist produces shiny stainless-steel rock sculptures as modern-day tributes to the scholar stones worshiped by generations of Chinese. To construct each piece, he wraps a traditional Chinese scholar's rock in sheets of stainless steel, then removes and welds them into a seamless, mirror-like form. His rock sculptures—often monumental in scale, as seen at Donum—are featured in major museum collections, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
The name Artificial Rock (Jiashanshi) is borrowed from the popular term for Scholar Rock. Wang's process results in handmade, three-dimensional 'rubbings' of natural stones. While the surface is artificial, the interior retains the natural form of the original rock, concealing a deeper “truth.” In the modernized cityscape, these artificial surfaces take on a new visual reality. As the artist wrote in 1995, “Today, real-life lies hidden in fantasies beneath dazzling surfaces, in stones now made hollow.”
Biography
Zhan Wang sprang to fame in 1993 with a work titled 'In a Twinkling' (1993) – a set of ultra-realistic sculptures of human figures that were displayed in unexpected outdoor locations. His art can be seen as a reflection on the clash between old and new, between the natural and the man-made in contemporary China. "In China,” he says, “modernization is associated with the West: when China modernizes, it westernizes." For his 2008 exhibition "On Gold Mountain" at the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco, he used rocks selected from the foothills of the Sierra Nevada to create his sculptures, "alluding to the nineteenth-century Chinese immigrant experience of mining gold during the California gold rush.” He also created as cityscape of San Francisco using all steel items, such as rocks, mirrored surfaces, silverware, and stainless steel pots and pans.
