2018
Single-channel 4K video, color, sound
31'18"
Courtesy the artist and WHITE SPACE BEIJING

Revenge serves as a key archetypal narrative within “The Northeast Tetralogy.” In the first installment, Smoke and Fire, Wang Tuo restages a violent crime that recently provoked heated discussion within China—the revenge murders carried out by a man named Zhang Koukou in 2018. The protagonist of the video is a migrant worker, working on a construction site in a small city in the Northeast, wallowing in painful memories of the childhood loss of his mother, and finally embarking on the journey home to complete the ritualized act of revenge. He also appears in a movie prop warehouse, reading esoteric stories from Republican-era China, such as the case of Shi Jianqiao, who gained fame for avenging the murder of her military officer father. Again and again, the worker rehearses the act of revenge. Many of the archetypal characters that reappear throughout “The Northeast Tetralogy”enacting various different story arcs are introduced one after the other in Smoke and Fire: the revenge-seeker, the scholar, the ghost, the mother.Through the repeated rehearsal of these character-types, the narrative of the film gradually spreads outwards.

2019
3-channel 4K video, color, sound
24'38"
Courtesy the artist and WHITE SPACE BEIJING

In Distorting Words, the narrative expands from individual fate to cycles of history, revealing the concept of “pan-shamanization” as a way of viewing history in which one may, due to a kind of opportunity posed by fluctuations of time and space, engage in dialogue with history and cut across temporality in their consciousness. This awakening of shamanhood is implied to be set off by personal calamity, caused the pain brought about by the drastic changing of the times. In Wang’s artworks the reincarnation and the reenactment of history are manifested through specific actions as a kind of prelude to future events. Distorting Words was completed in 2019, the year that Zhang Koukou was executed for his revenge murders, as well as the one hundredth anniversary of the death of Guo Qinguang, who died during the May 4th Movement, becoming the first martyr of China’s New Democracy Movement. The work once again uses the figure of a migrant worker to present Zhang Koukou’s conflicted mental state on the eve of seeking vengeance, and re-enacts Guo Qinguang’s death through the introduction of a scholar character. Here, two deaths occurring a hundred years apart have produced an intersection across time and space, while suggesting an analogous relationship between the "mother" and "nation" for which these sacrifices were made.

2021
Single-channel 4k video, color, sound
66'00''
Courtesy the artist and WHITE SPACE BEIJING

Commissioned by Power Station of Art (Shanghai)

The principle narrative arc of Tungus unfolds within a hidden history, modified to become a kind of alternative history. In the winter of 1948, two Korean soldiers attempt to escape from the battlefield of Changchun to return to their home of Jeju Island. Gradually they come to the realization that the time and space they find themselves in overlap with that of the Jeju Uprising—an encounter of two geographies and temporalities from Northeast Asian history. Simultaneously, an elderly scholar trapped in Changchun looks back upon his own life in a trance state brought on by extreme hunger. In his subconscious, he converses with the ghost of Guo Qinguang and embarks upon a journey with him, finally coming to a realization about the real-life dilemma he is entangled in. In Tungus, through the exploration of events—some real, some fictitious—hidden within macrohistorical narratives, the artist’s analysis of Northeast China expands to the wider regional and historical frame of Northeast Asia.

2021
2-channel 4K video, color, sound
30'00"
Courtesy the artist and WHITE SPACE BEIJING

Wailing Requiem, the final installment of “The Northeast Tetralogy, follows the life of the “migrant worker assassin” in the city before he returns home to seek revenge, as shown from the perspective of his roommate, a fellow laborer. In the city their alienated identities initially formed a barrier between them, but as they travel to their respective hometowns, a connection grows between their spirits. Driven by emotions between the two of them that they can neither define nor clarify, the workers comprehend anew this narrative that transcends individual revenge, and realize that personal emotions may have an unconscious, irrational link with macrohistory. As the tetralogy concludes, reality and fantasy intertwine, past and present tenses antagonize each other, and fragments of China’s modern history make fleeting appearances.

2019
Single-channel 4K video, color, sound
26'51"
Courtesy the artist and WHITE SPACE BEIJING

Commissioned by Guangdong Times Museum for the exhibition "Forget Sorrow Grass: An Archaeology of Feminine Time" (2019), curated by Wu Jianru and Sirui Zhang.

The fictional memories of a single individual provide the core text of Symptomatic Silence of Complicit Forgetting, yet these recollections also condense together the collective memories of an entire generation. An elderly writer falls into a depressed rut with his writing, plagued by memories of his mother from an earlier era. Simultaneously, a younger incarnation of the writer aimlessly wanders through a dusty archive for years, searching for something. By interweaving snippets of historical scenes along with these elements, the artwork constructs a kind of alienated space, in which the contradictions between historical trauma and the experience of daily life are exposed. Wang Tuo’s ghost story about an academic turns into a metaphor for historical scars, which here become a phantom that may be summoned at any moment, drifting in the gap between psychological space and real life. The piece’s title points to a generation that has overlooked or suppressed these contradictions, serving to gradually create a situation in which amnesia appears to be the product of a conspiracy. Here, history has become a competition of memory against memory, and memory against reality. The symbiotic relationship between human and ghost symbolizes the restrictive ties between people and historical archives, an entangled bond that is finally acted out in fantasy as the protagonist’s mother takes the stage to perform.

2016
3-channel 4K video, color, sound
26'15"
Courtesy the artist and WHITE SPACE BEIJING

In a dislocated manner, Meditation on Disappointing Reading retells a story found in Pearl S. Buck’s novel Three Daughters of Madame Liang (1969). The artist has reconstructed the novel by using translation software to create a Chinese version of the original English text, forming a seemingly meaningless narrative while serving as a powerful metaphor for histories of migration and the challenges faced by immigrants living in a cultural context different from their own. The two characters in Wang Tuo's film—a daughter and the soul of her deceased mother—allude to the complex, intertwined relationship between individuals and historical documents. This is reflected in the work when the daughter prepares a meal for her mother’s soul, beginning a somber memorial ceremony and summoning ritual in which the focus on the soul (rather than physical body) emphasizes her mother’s existence in an invisible manner, just as the absence of historical sources also summons them as an objects of memory.

2019
Single-channel 4K video, color, sound
20'31''
Courtesy the artist and WHITE SPACE BEIJING

Commissioned by UCCA Center for Contemporary Art

The video Obsessions grew out of Wang Tuo’s interest in and concern about a particular missing person case. The details of the incident sparked him to investigate subjects such as human desire, obsessive behavior, architecture, and psychoanalysis. The narration of the work suggests a situation in which an architect is undergoing hypnosis. He imagines himself as a building. By exploring the structure from a subjective perspective, from far away and close up, from exterior to interior, the audience is able to move layer by layer deeper into the mind of the architect and discover a “secret chamber” within both his subconscious and the piece of architecture. The images that the viewer sees accompanying this monologue are of the Fusuijing Building, built in the late-1950s in Beijing’s Xicheng District as an embodiment of High Socialist ideals. Today, it sits half-abandoned, its outer appearance plain and unassuming. Yet its interior is deep and labyrinthine, looming in front of our eyes pregnant with meaning yet uncommunicative, akin to the “Big Dumb Objects” often found in the writing of British science fiction author Arthur C. Clarke. Here, the artist uses the structure of the building to model the elusive shape of our subconscious, and then probes into the tension and contradictions between public and private realms.

2016
Single-channel 4K video, color, sound
24'31"
Courtesy the artist and WHITE SPACE BEIJING

Roleplay is a short performance-based film, alternating between two narrative spaces. In the first, two professional actors who do not know each other sit in the living room of a fancy apartment rented by the artist, improvising responses to standard marriage counseling questions in order to present themselves as a “perfect” bourgeois couple. In the other narrative framework, the actors are shown separately, in their respective real-life homes, where they perform as characters from the 1981 American noir film The Postman Always Rings Twice, tracing out the plot of the movie. The similarities in structure and contrast in content between these two narratives highlight how in each of the fabricated situations, “performance” is composed differently and carries varying metaphors. In the improvised section, the artist explores how constructed concepts like “middle class” or “the perfect marriage” sneak into our collective unconscious and effectively shape discourses. The sense of detachment here, heightened by the reenactment of a readymade fictional narrative, emphasizes the unsteady relationship between assumed social concepts and reality.