Kaboom! Get Stuck Between a Rock and an Art Space

Zhan Wang has a thing for rocks. He’s been working with the medium for more than a decade now, transforming traditional Chinese scholar rocks – natural, craggy forms that inspire contemplation – into stainless steel sculptures with a modern facade. They're the main feature in “My Personal Universe,” his new exhibit at the UCCA, which recreates the Big Bang by exploding a big boulder. The exhibition’s accompanying film, “Legend of the Stone,” documents his explosive artistic process, naturally fraught with village politics. (What, doesn’t every farmer want a huge rock blown up on his land?)

Enter Wang’s exhibition space, and you’ll encounter more than 7,000 stainless steel rock fragments hanging in mid-air. These are replicas of the actual debris, precisely placed to recapture the moment after the burst. Different angles of the explosion play on six surrounding screens, and as the video plays, it's easy to feel increasingly consumed by the expanding explosion. On-screen rocks – coming closer and closer – seem to blend in with those hanging next to you to displace reality and emphasize how small, in the scheme of things, you really are.

Playing with time is part of Wang’s experiment to understand the universe’s beginning. "I used a moment to represent one hundred million years. With these rocks, I can travel through a tunnel of time,” he says. Wang believes that tIme and space are anything but fixed, and if we're to take stock in his words we should start taking cover. According to Wang, the universe, like his explosion, will come to an end.

Doomsday prophecies aside, Wang has not completely abandoned notions of the eternal. The artist uses stainless steel in his practice for its reflective nature, which allows it to mirror its surrounding environment and adapt to the times. The artist claims: "What is adaptational is eternal." He imagines the steel bending, stretching, even freezing time, making the point that our whole existence might take place in a mere moment during the aftermath of an explosion.

With “My Personal Universe,” Wang concerns himself with an isolated event, one that recreates the very universe whose space-time continuum it also tries to unravel. Like the scholar rocks, Wang’s rocks can be starting points for meditation and existential thought (not to mention sturdy paperweights). If you're looking for an intro to cosmology, put down that book by Stephen Hawking – “My Personal Universe” has the fundamentals covered.

“My Personal Universe” rocks the UCCA until Feb 25.

Click here to see the January issue of the Beijinger in full.

Photo courtesy of the UCCA.