Dinner Table
Wang Gongxin
王功新
Production date
2006
Object Detail
Media
video projection on tabletop (colour, sound)
Measurements
table 250 cm diameter
video 5 min 5 seconds
video 5 min 5 seconds
Notes
In ‘Dinner Table’ new media pioneer Wang Gongxin has created a work in which a lavish Chinese banquet is projected onto an improbably tilted round banqueting table, suggesting the expensive meals that in recent years became the focus of Xi Jinping’s crackdown on corrupt officialdom. In Wang’s piece, though, the sumptuous display of food and liquor is spilled and destroyed; bottles and glasses are knocked over and plates fall from the table. But they fall upwards, in slow motion, defying the laws of gravity and subverting our expectations, until eventually only the stained tablecloth is left behind. Critic and curator Pi Li says that Wang Gongxin’s work ‘doesn’t escape reality, but many of his pieces make reality just a little lighter’.
Accession number
2007.068