Camy Tam
An exhibition titled “Post-truth: Fool others as well as oneself” (後真相：鏡海撈針in Chinese) by mainland artist Wang Yanxin (王彥鑫) is being held at the Post-Ox Warehouse Experimental Site.
According to Wiktionary, the term “post-truth” refers to a time period or situation in which facts – supposedly – have become less important than emotional persuasion.
The event is jointly organised by the Ox Warehouse and Chongqing Dimensions Art Centre as an artist exchange programme called: “2+0 / 1+1 Artist-in-Residence Programme” to diversify cultural exchanges between the two places. The exhibition is sponsored by the public Macau Foundation (FM), according to an article on the gallery’s Facebook page.
The information provided by the gallery points out that four artists are participating in this year’s exchange programme: 1+1 meaning Wang Yanxin (王彥鑫) from Lanzhou who is in Macau while local artist Wong Weng Io (黃詠瑤) will travel to Chongqing by the second half of this year to exhibit her work. 2+0 refers to two artists who will come to Macau later this year – Cao Cai (曹愷) from Changzhou in Jiangsu province and Liao Yu-An (廖堉安) from Taipei while “0” means there will be no local artist going to Chanzhou and Taipei.
According to the article, Wang was born in Lanzhou, which lies some 1,800 km north of Macau and is the capital and largest city of Gansu province. Wang lives both in Chengdu and Mianyang (the capital and second-largest city respectively of Sichuan province). He graduated from the Sichuan Academy of Fine Arts (SFAI). Wang has been involved in multi-media artistic creation since 2012, based on performance art and by participating in solo and group exhibitions in the mainland, Macau, Australia, Japan, New Zealand, Thailand and Europe.
According to the article, “the exhibition is an experiment of media expansion undertaken by Wang who utilises performance art as the major medium that is complemented by videography, installations, photography, painting and other means. The experiment of cross-media artistic creation initiates the discussions for oneself starting from an artist-in-residence project in Macau, and explores the possibilities of artistic creation through a game-based approach.”
The article points out that Wang creates this series based on self observation and awareness of the weakness, vulnerability and pretence of oneself. “There are questions over what makes one look tough in appearance, what makes one feel fear and what makes one feel powerless, leading to critical thinking of oneself. German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche says, ‘There are no facts, only interpretations.’ Different events only represent different interpretations. As ‘emotions are more influential than facts’, lies can be interpreted as ‘another point of view’ or ‘an opinion’ because ‘everything is relative’ and ‘everyone has their own truth’. Thus, this project is also an experiment of the reconstruction of ‘truth’ by oneself,” the article points out.
The exhibition is on until May 30 on the 1st, 2nd and 3rd floors of the Post-Ox Warehouse Experimental Site at 15 Rua do Volong, except on Mondays, from noon to 7 p.m. daily. Admission is free.
Visitors are required to wear a facemask and apply hand sanitiser when entering the venue.
For enquiries call 2853 0026 or visit the website: https://www.facebook.com/oxwarehouse/
Photos: Camy Tam
