The creation of Wang Wei’s work Temporary Space, 2003, was composed of multiple stages. This work, which is characterized by a range of different and complementary patterns of thought and action, began as a concrete action in a given space: Wei began by engaging a dozen or so mingong workers,* who build and sell used bricks. They were asked to gather up red bricks that were produced several decades ago, and which are used in poor areas of Beijing for the construction of Hutong-style buildings. The workers gathered 20,000 bricks, and brought them to the entrance of an empty gallery. They then used these bricks to create a square structure inside the gallery; rising four meters high and measuring a total of 100 square meters, it filled up the entire gallery space. This structure undermined the concept of the white cube – both by precluding the possibility of ”viewing from a distance” and by ”painting” the white cube with the grid of red bricks. Several days after the construction process was completed, the workers returned to dismantle the structure they had built. They cleaned the space, gathered up the bricks and went off to sell them. The entire process lasted 20 days; the video work and still photographs included in this exhibition are both a documentation of this process, and a work in itself.
Temporary Space raises questions and thoughts about space in general, and about exhibition spaces in particular; about purposefulness and goals; about cheap labor; about cyclical processes of construction and destruction; and about reality and its simulation. Moreover, it requires us to consider the acute question of context. Examining this work alongside the joint work by Dina Shoham and Hanna Farah-Kufer Birim, for instance, serves to underscore the importance of the following issue: when two Israeli/Palestinian artists touch upon the question of construction, it is associated in an instinctive, acute and immediate manner with the local political context, and with the power relations that shape it. The question of these power relations is rendered more extreme through the use of concrete imagery involving bricks and construction work. An initial examination of Wei’s work may remain within the realm of modernist interpretation, and focus on the action and on the work’s structure and form. Yet an additional viewing of this work, especially in Israel, raises the issue of illegal workers without any civil status – not only in the countries they immigrate to, but also in their countries of origin. In both cases, this issue concerns the definition and legitimization of norms on both a human and a political level – and the conditions of possibility produced by the seemingly simple and taken-for-granted concept of ”citizenship.”
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