In the spring of 1990, Yan Lei and I set off from Hangzhou and travelled by train and ferry to the country town of Dinghai in Zhoushan archipelago. We were on our way to visit the artist Wu Shanzhuan. Wu was living in a dormitory of the Dinghai province Institute for Mass Culture. We knocked at the battered front door which was secured with an iron lock. After some time an ordinary-looking fellow came to the doorway, shouting in Zhoushan dialect "Wu Shanzhuan! Wu Shanzhuan!" Then he stared at us for a bit, and said "You're here to see Wu Shanzhuan, too, aren't you? Right, then you can stay over at my place tonight." His place’ was located in a row of seven or eight blocks of small three-storey buildings. Inside, every room was piled high with smuggled cigarettes. Our new pal said "Feel free to smoke as much as you like!"

The next day we met up with Wu Shanzhuan. All over the walls of his very messy room were tacked food coupons and paper scraps of various kinds, all scribbled with poems. Having drunk too much, I lurched through the door of another room in the flat. It was quite dark inside but seemed to be stuffed with all kinds of junk. Facing the wall, I piddled into the corner. Wu Shanzhuan also pushed open the door and came to relieve himself beside me. Afterwards, when we went to take a look at Wu’s artwork, we were surprised to find Wu leading us back into that same room. Turning on the light, we found the walls and floor were completely covered with "big character posters" composed of Wu's miswritten words (cuobiezi). To this day, we have no idea what lucky collector ended up getting his hands on those artworks.

So this is Wu Shanzhuan and his country town and his frends and his things.

This is the place where Wu invented the "deficit (red) character" (chizi). He calls it a kind of "silent ocean". A "silent ocean" is an ocean of entropy, an ocean that can be filled with infinite linguistic meanings; and Wu Shanzhuan's home- town is called "Dinghai" (Translator's note: ding can mean "to stabilize" or "to define", and hai means ocean. Thus Dinghai could variously be interpreted as "stable Ocean" or "defining the Ocean").

--Excerpted from Qiu Zhijie's Wu Shanzhuan's subjects and systems.

About Wu Shanzhuan

Wu Shanzhuan (b. 1960, China). One of the key figures of the '85 New Wave Art Movement in China, Wu Shanzhuan's practice defies use of conventional visual art terms such as "watch", "stare" and "experience" to engage with. Instead, pulling together street smartness, intellectual experimentation and the spirit of the absurd in contemporary art, Wu Shanzhuan and his collaborator Inga Svala Thorsdottir draw you into a world where "read" becomes the key term. They are not creators of visual spectacles, but rather overthrowers and discoverers of truths and propositions, as well as counterfeiters of ideology and interpreters of everyday theology.

Wu Shanzhuan defines himself as criminal, intermediary, tourist and labor. The works Wu Shanzhuan creates are not the granted artworks but rather "Wu's Things". From the large number of "Wu's Things" made in the early 1990s, we see a desire for full opening and "transcending the boundaries" and his obsession with mathematics and logic which brings a strange sense of truth to his works. For a society dictated by a variety of faiths and customs, this is an "adulterated" truth. Wu never tires of quoting from Sartre: "People are a bundle of useless passion". The use for his useless passion is to find "useless truths". For more than 20 years, Wu Shanzhuan has used the forumulas "pseudo-words", "thing's right(s)", "parthenogenesis", "secondhand water", "tourist information", "perfect bracket" and "bird before peace", all of which are "useless truths", to weave his personal ideology. This ideology constitutes a profound critique to the system of concepts and experiences that we are accustomed to.

In the era when conceptual art generally faces a rethink, the works attest a vibrancy of concept and the power of thoughts. It is a rich collection of intriguing humor and sharp wit, spontaneous anti-metaphysical actions, insights into everyday politics, sensitivity to invisible workings of power systems and adherence to the fundamental state of democracy.