DSL Collection

In Baby Talk (1996), a suspended projector is hanging from the ceiling, projecting images of facial expressions of six adults: the parents, the paternal grandparents and the maternal grandparents, teasing and playing with a baby. These images are projected on the surface of a cradle. This cradle is actually a mini pool filled with milk. In the middle of pool there is a circulatory system which pumps and drains the milk. The only sound we can hear is the running of milk. This work was first shown in the first video art exhibition PHENONMENA & IMAGE, which took place in the China Academy of Fine Arts in Hangzhou in China in 1996.

Wang Gongxin declares:
?This work was shown at the first video art exhibition in China in 1996. I made a cradle out of metal pipes. The cradle is slightly larger than the real size. On the surface of the cradle, that is the bed where a baby normally sleeps, I created a sink device which has a circulatory system for filling and draining liquid. I then filled the cradle with milk and put a projector above the cradle to project images on the milk surface. There is a motor and several pipes attached to the cradle. The motor creates sound and forms milk whirlpool. The motor also allows the milk to be filled up from the side of the cradle and drained out in the middle, just like a circulatory system. The audience can hear the loud sound of running milk.
I filmed six adults speaking in turn to a baby and projected their images directly on the milk surface. When making this video, my son was only two and a half months old. The six adults are my wife, myself, my parents and my wife?s parents. When I made this video, I actually asked everyone to speak to my baby. I asked them not to use any form of human language, only to use the baby?s sound such as ?ah?? when talking to my baby. When they were talking, I filmed their expressions.
When I showed the film, I muted the human voice. I aimed the mouths of the adult speakers directly above the hole of the drain. No one could hear the sound of the human voice instead he could only hear the loud running and draining sound coming out from the cradle. I showed each of the six adults in turn and each adult appeared around 20 seconds long. The film is therefore around two minutes long in total.
In this work, the material used and the imagery projected are closely connected. We see the flowing milk runs around the mouths of the two generations of adults: the parents and the grand parents. The milk symbolises the food for the baby who is absent in the video and yet the images of the six adults on the surface of the milk also suggest his presence. The changing expressions of the six adults and the constant running and draining of milk not only suggest a sense of impermanence, at the same time, they also signify the continuity in life.?
Wang Gongxin

?In the late 1990s, the level of sophistication brought to the works that Wang Gongxin produced was far in advance of the general local under- standing of the aesthetic applications of video. Installations pieces such as Baby Talk 1996, in which close-up images representing family members engaging in baby talk with an unseen infant, were projected on a film of milk in a crib in place of a mattress, and The Old Bench 1996, an actual bench in which a section had been re?placed by a monitor replaying an exact scale image of the missing square, are good examples of Wang Gongxin's approach. Something of a perfectionist in his execution, the volume of his output has always been measured.?
Karen Smith ?The Real Thing?

The development of new media art in China owes an enormous debt to the pioneering experiments undertaken by Wang Gongxin in the late 1990s, when contemporary art in China was barely a decade old and video still an emergent medium. The first to experiment with video beyond being a mere recording tool and the first to engage with visual effects?
Tate Liverpool? catalogue

Wang Gongxin has been quite concerned with the interface between Chinese and Western culture, in terms of content and of his transmission of "Western" artistic ideas to his peers.

For example, his piece "The Sky of Brooklyn: Digging a Hole in Beijing" (1995) was one of the first site-specific installations in China. The site happened to be Wang's personal residence, where he commissioned workers to dig a hole three meters deep and place in it a video monitor playing footage of the Brooklyn sky. This was done as a reference to both the American childhood fantasy of "digging a hole to China"; and the Chinese saying "to look at the world from a well". Wang Gongxin's video works include "The Old Bench" (1996; exhibited in Inside/ Out), "Baby Talk" (1996), "Public Hallway"; (1997), and "Shepard" (1998).

The work of Wang Gongxin is not usually narrative but describes a point in time. Wang does not offer any background or comment on this work and therefore leaves us to wander free with our subjective attachments. While Wang's work is not necessarily read exclusively in a Chinese context, we could venture further to read the work relating to the notion of individualism in a post communist society. Does this individual stand for the masses? Is it a person or is it the People?

Wang's work floats outside the parameters of a mainstream critical position. It has not been aligned with any specific art movement and therefore has not been intensely interrogated or positioned in relation to a particular movement. However, his work is part of an international art dialogue of video art history. It poses open and relevant visions that are concerned with an ongoing development of a deeply personal expression. Wang's work can be threaded to video artists such as Bill Viola and Gary Hill as a source of influence and genre