In her famous 1989 performance, Chinese artist Xiao Lu fired two shots at a mirror at the National Art Gallery’s “China/Avant-Garde” exhibition in Beijing, prompting authorities to temporarily close the exhibition. The gun had been loaded with three bullets – a fact that symbolizes the unfinished revolution in Wang Tuo’s two-part film, The second interrogation (all works 2023).
Projected onto freestanding walls perpendicular to the Blindspot Gallery, the first chapter revolves around the fictional dialogue between an artist and a state censor, whose perspectives are presented in separate channels. Sequences are often dubbed, with changes in angle and framing that achieve elegant choreography. As the characters cross paths, they discuss art, ideology, and the “cold summer” of 1989, gradually revealing their own confused allegiances. The single-channel finale is similarly structured by a conversation, this time between the ghosts of two artists who consider contemporary China politics in a long history of failed resistance movements.
In both parts, scenes of the artist-protagonist leading a rehearsal for a performance are intercut with re-enactments of the seven interventions that took place in “China/Avant-Garde”, reflecting Wang’s penchant for spatial collapse, temporal and (semi)fictional. kingdoms. The question is: Who will fire the third shot?
Wang’s film is accompanied by “Weapons,” a series of paintings that pay homage to living examples of Chinese counterculture. Many subjects fade into the background, such as a reclining musician whose head and torso are rendered like a spectral mist in Improvisation of Blue II. The bodies are even more abstract in drawings of smudged faces and outstretched hands that refer to moments of The second interrogation as well as photographs of the Tiananmen Square protests. Evoked in loose, frantic strokes, Wang’s anonymous figures are no less imposing for these elisions, expressing the power of amorphous dissent.
