Everything From Nothing
Wang Lei
王雷
Production date
2013
Object Detail
Media
newspapers
Measurements
14 pieces, dimensions variable
Notes
Wang Lei is a knitter of both words and meanings. His needles are ordinary No. 9s or 10s, but his yarn is made from printed paper. Everything from Nothing is a meditation on a line from the Tao te Ching: “Being gives rise to all things in heaven and earth; being arises from non-being.” Wang Lei cut people’s faces from a year’s worth of the Oriental Daily newspaper and crowded them onto a long scroll similar to those used for ink painting or calligraphy. He dampened the discarded paper, rolled and twisted it into string, then patiently knitted twelve large sacks, whose nondescript greyness results from the deliberate exclusion of “elements of life and time”: colour, people, and datelines (which the artist placed in a small acrylic box). The faces, cropped like identity-card images, are indistinguishable from a distance; they might be anyone, the artist says, from any place or time. As to the bulging sacks, viewers must fill these with their own imaginings: “A banker might think they are full of money, an actor might think they are full of costumes.” In reality, apart from crumpled paper, “There is nothing inside.”
Accession number
2014.098