“Water cannot wash away water. Dust cannot be contaminated by dust“. Chinese proverb
A rainbow brings childlike joy like multicoloured sweets bursting under the tongue. The work of Wang Lingjie and Hao Jingfang has nothing sweet, it has a scientific basis, yet it transports us to the shores of dream and wonder. For artists, art is useless and should be useless in everyday life.
Hao Jingfang and Wang Lingjie are a couple of Chinese artists who have been living in France for a decade, trained at the rigour of an engineering school in Shanghai and the more conceptualist French art schools. They have founded an explosive and poetic duo. They deploy a work where dust, powder, pollen, sand, colour are spread, scrutinised, dosed and materialised by clouds, rainbows, or fine rivers of drops. The names chosen for the works suggest a strong attachment to the universe: Arc-en-ciel (Rainbow), Gravité (Gravity), Sun is drawing, Champ d’étoiles (Field of Stars).
With a solid technical know-how, physical tools, a thorough study of light and movement, the artists shape a world attentive to the elements that are often invisible, but which form the basis of the universe: colour emanating from light, steam constantly in the air, small particles etc.
With Over The Rainbow billions of glass microspheres spread out to form a vast mineral stain, imitating the natural process involving water drops and light. The spectator must move around the work so that the eye can follow the coloured arc, a happy ephemeral event.
In a constant search for balance and harmony, the work of Hao Jingfang and Wang Lingjie is not part of a direct political act, as some of their Chinese peers were able to do at the dawn of the 2000s, but in a more meditative process. Small discrepancies, small grains of sand can come to stop things. The cycle and impermanence are at the heart of their approach as well as time and space.