Follow You
Wang Qingsong
王庆松
Production date
2013
Object Detail
Media
digital C-type print
Measurements
180 x 300 cm
Notes
Wang’s three-metre wide, staged photograph Follow You (2013) is the sequel to two earlier works (not in the White Rabbit Collection), Follow Me (2003) and Follow Him (2010). It expands his critical examination of contemporary culture into a consideration of the impact of education policy. Follow You shows a kind of examination hell: hundreds of students sit at tiny desks behind teetering stacks of English and Chinese textbooks. Despite their bottles of Coca-Cola (Wang’s recurring symbol of globalisation), they are fast asleep, as if a spell has been cast. The walls of this enormous classroom are papered with slogans exhorting diligence – ‘Progress every day!’ ‘Study well!’ – of the kind once found in every school and university. But their usual exclamation marks have been replaced by question marks, representing the doubt felt by a new generation. Other questions appear too: ‘Why do we fart?’, ‘Why do we dream?’, ‘Why do we die?’
Wang makes his usual Hitchcock-like appearance in this photograph, seated amongst the slumbering students, wearing a fake grey beard and long hair like an ancient scholar. He is the only figure in the photograph who is awake, hooked up to an intravenous line providing him with mysterious stimulants. This is a savage critique of the factory assembly line approach to education, a grind of rote-learning in which independent thought is discouraged, with a stressful, highly competitive gaokao examination at the end of the line. And what then? For many of today’s graduates, unemployment beckons. Wang says the biggest problem with education in China is that education became an industry for profit, with a proliferation of training schools, ‘cram colleges’ preparing students for university entrance exams, and for those who want to study overseas. Wang Qingsong’s large-scale cinematic allegories critique pressing issues facing contemporary China. The sleeping students in Follow You represent his special concerns about the next generations in China, oblivious to the past and subject to enormous pressure to succeed. But at what cost?
Wang makes his usual Hitchcock-like appearance in this photograph, seated amongst the slumbering students, wearing a fake grey beard and long hair like an ancient scholar. He is the only figure in the photograph who is awake, hooked up to an intravenous line providing him with mysterious stimulants. This is a savage critique of the factory assembly line approach to education, a grind of rote-learning in which independent thought is discouraged, with a stressful, highly competitive gaokao examination at the end of the line. And what then? For many of today’s graduates, unemployment beckons. Wang says the biggest problem with education in China is that education became an industry for profit, with a proliferation of training schools, ‘cram colleges’ preparing students for university entrance exams, and for those who want to study overseas. Wang Qingsong’s large-scale cinematic allegories critique pressing issues facing contemporary China. The sleeping students in Follow You represent his special concerns about the next generations in China, oblivious to the past and subject to enormous pressure to succeed. But at what cost?
Accession number
2013.122