Preface：GAME-RULE


For the people who first knew Wen Zhe, Wen Zhe is Wen Long.

“Long” (龙; dragon, a symbol of classical Chinese aesthetics) has become “Zhe” (晢; bright, apparent, similar to the character for philosophy), just as in this exhibition the intricate traditional Chinese naturalistic painting technique of gongbi has become code and online game. The artistic technique has broken free from its defined and familiar cultural context to become the set of rules that inhabit a virtual world and govern an online game – a conversion from totem worship^① to digital faith. As the artist puts it, the allure of these rules as they appear in artistic form is a result of the fact that their aesthetic nature has yet to be discussed.

When Wen Zhe truly became “Wen Zhe,” he was already familiar with the idea of “using art to express other established forms of art,”^② but now he finds this approach lacking. It is not that the past bores him – new fields appear before him before he has even had the chance to put their rules in order – it’s just that he has finally had the chance to become his own philosopher; freely creating a new system that will apparently only appeal to a new generation, attempting to convince everyone that another world exists beyond our reality. As such, our limited artistic experience has no choice but to test once again the established rules of the relation between form and content – to transform, as the artist himself does, the theory of games from the question of games playing with humans into that of art playing with games.


① Here we must try to remember the traditional character for dragon, 龍, the right side of which resembles a totem.

② I suspect what Wen Zhe is referring to here is the way in which as a participant in projects he used to trace numerous ancient gongbi paintings, such as the famous work A Palace Concert. This is precisely what I understand to be a typical example of “using art to express other established forms of art.” To put it in somewhat overblown terms, aside from Wen Zhe and myself, there does not seem to have ever been anyone who has really considered the question of “using art to render manifest art.” It seems that Wen Zhe begins in media res from a question in progress – the question of whether online games are art – to avoid the established artistic concern of “reflecting real life.” In my opinion, Wen Zhe can continue to use the concrete technique of gongbi while avoiding becoming a slave to reality in large part because he first completed the theoretical work of considering a question that is pertinent to our age. Although we cannot help but remain in this reality or historical past, we can still be full of intrigue about this conceptual exploration.


Chen Tong
Translated by Stephen Nashef

^{Wen Zhe in the eyes of curator Chen Tong: No practice, no style}

^{Wen Zhe: The thought of human is art}