Welcome to the Desert of the Real

Overview

Wang Jianwei’s work is inspired by Slavoj Žižek’s book of the same name – a quote from the 1999 film The Matrix that echoes Jean Beaudrillard’s influential treatise Simulacra and Simulation.

The starting point is the true story of a sixteen-year-old boy who moved with his family from a small Chinese village to the city. The teenager struggles to maintain his identity among the urban crowds, and gradually escapes into the virtual reality of online gaming, until he can no longer distinguish between fantasy and real life.

Other videos relate tales of a street vendor who dies in her home, an indifferent middle-aged man, an unexpected incident in an Internet café and the mental breakdown of a cyclist. Connections occur between the boy and these other characters, questioning the boundaries between the real and the imagined.

Originally shown as a theatre production in 2010, Welcome to the Desert of the Real has been reimagined for the Sharjah Biennial. In this setup, each video is shown in a separate viewing box. Viewers can thus only watch the videos individually, although the sound from all five seeps into the gallery space.


2013

This project was part of Sharjah Biennial 11