The Sky of Brooklyn—digging a hole in Beijing布魯克林的天空—在北京打井
1995
The Sky of Brooklyn – digging a hole in Beijing documents the first site-specific video installation in mainland China. Wang Gongxin, a pioneer of avant-garde video and media art, dug a hole 3.5 metres deep in the middle of his family’s living room in Beijing and placed a television monitor at the bottom of the brick-lined well. The screen displayed a loop of footage of the blue sky Wang had filmed outside his Brooklyn studio earlier that year. The artwork embodies and plays off of the American expression, ‘digging a hole to China’, used to describe an impossible task, like trying to burrow into the earth far enough to come out the other side. The work represents the connections and distances—both physical and cultural—between the United States and China that Wang experienced in the 1990s. As globalisation continues to integrate disparate locations via technological media, the piece raises issues of national representation in contemporary art, namely the way artists and curators from the West and China view each other. The documentation of this seminal artwork includes photographs, a hand-drawn sketch of the original installation, and video containing still images of the process and footage of the Brooklyn sky with the artist’s voice asking, in Mandarin, ‘What are you looking at?’