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It is hard to think of a country that has experienced more wrenching change than China, so it is not surprising that some of the most daring creativity today also originates in the Middle Kingdom. The theater performance of  Wang Jianwei’s “Welcome to the Desert of the Real,” which showed at the Grütli Theater in Geneva last Wednesday, is a brilliant testimony both to the universality of one of China’s most exciting creative minds and to the Grutli’s importance in pushing the envelope of Geneva’s exposure to the contemporary art scene.

Wang Jianwei’s theater piece is based on the true story of a 16-year old boy, who moved from a rural province to the city and struggled to redefine his sense of identity.  Given the choice between an imaginary world and the dystopic reality of today’s chaotic urban environment, the teenager chooses the more appealing fictional world. It is not hard to understand why. The virtual world of video games and pop culture may appear to be  chaotic, but it gives the participant the illusion that he is in control of his own destiny, a gift that reality seldom offers. When the boy’s mother tried to pull him back to real world, he killed her in order to remain in the artificial world of video games.  By then it was not clear that he understood what murder in the physical world actually entails.

Starting from this news event, Wang Jianwei created five short theatrical sketches: a middle-aged man suffers from the indifference of the people around him; a cyclist loses control on his bike; an accident happens in a web bar; a woman, who sells roasted chicken wings,  dies in her booth; a boy wanders down a street alone. The set consists of a number of large wooden crates on the stage and a giant video screen above.  While symbol-filled videos flash on the screen, Wang Jianwei’s actor-dancers climb out of the boxes and perform an erratic ballet, periodically jerking their bodies as if they are experiencing electrical shocks.  If not forewarned, the story line is easy to miss since there is no dialogue or explanation. The movements appear chaotic and at times the dancers seem in danger of colliding with each other, but in fact everything is carefully choreographed and tightly disciplined.

Wang Jianwei’s work has a universality that reaches beyond China, and he makes it clear that this story is about the human condition, not just about what is happening in his homeland. French philosopher-psychoanalyst, Jacques Lacan provided some of the inspiration, and Wang JIanwei is particularly interested in the ideas of Slovenian philosopher, Slavoj Zizek, who was influenced by Lacan’s ideas.  Lacan realized that people use symbolism and imagination in their effort to come to grips with reality, but reality lies beyond the grasp of both imagination and symbolic models. It is, in fact, the void, which is outside the reach of men. Eventually, it becomes clear that the only way to deal with reality is to mimic it with a kind of virtual reality.

Wang Jiangwei’s theatrical piece takes its title from Zizek’s book, “Welcome to the Desert of the Real,” which points out that we find ourselves living increasingly in a fictional reality which seems to work fine until an incident like the 9/11 attack on the World Trade Center brings us back to a more realistic vision of the world and our place in it. We realize that we are under attack. We want to strike back, but against whom? The choice is to recognize the real world and join it, or to retreat back into a virtual one that appears to be more comforting, but which ultimately leads us to increasingly irrational actions and finally to paranoia.

Although the parallels are obvious, Wang Jiangwei’s drama is not directly connected to 9/11, or to America’s current difficulties in the Middle East. Instead it focuses intensely on the universal human condition in the contemporary world.  Wang Jianwei seems to have no easy answers.  When I asked him if he considers himself a pessimist or an optimist, he answered that he positions himself somewhere in between.  “If I were a pessimist, I would not be here,”he said. “If I were an optimist, I would not be an artist. I would not see a void that needs to be filled.”  Wang Jianwei expresses equal ambivalence concerning the illusion of safety.  “Sometimes you are safer in an environment that is dangerous,” he explains. “When I am in China, I pay more attention to crossing the street, because I know that cars may not stop for me. Here in Switzerland, I might pay less attention, because I expect the cars to see me.”

After the performance at the Grütli, it was clear that not everyone in the audience was able to make sense of what they had just seen. That kind of  incomprehension is not limited to Switzerland. Wang Jianwei admits that he often encounters resistance in China. In fact, he says, most of the resistance comes from the public, not the government. The occasional rejections leave him undeterred.  Honesty to one’s vision, he explains, means that the public has to make an extra effort to understand. “I could make it easy,” he says,”and the public might like the play better, but it wouldn’t be honest. If there are five people who like what I do, I am satisfied. It is not a question of numbers. It is a question of going to the end of one’s art.”

Links

Wang Jianwei's website

Online guide to Wang Jianwei's "Welcome to the Desert of the Real"

Zizek:  MIT The World of the Real after 9/11

Zizek: What does it mean to be a revolutionary today? (video)

Zizek interviewed by Euronews on cinema (video)

Zizek on the film, The Children of Men (video)