Trampoline is pleased to support the solo exhibition The Weight of the Invisible of the artist Wang Bing at Kunstverein für die Rheinlande und Westfalen in Düsseldorf, Germany.
The Weight of the Invisible is a two-part exhibition dedicated to the documentary work of the filmmaker and photographer Wang Bing (b. 1967 in Xi’an, China, lives in Paris). While Wang Bing’s films are epic in their length and their historical and political scope, they are less concerned with grand events than with the small gestures and everyday acts on which the concrete form and substance of human life rests. The artist devotes a special kind of attention to the small, incidental, and marginal – one that knows that existential weight does not necessarily lie in the obvious, but rather in the in-between, in the interstitial, in the enduring, and in what accumulates.
The Weight of the Invisible focuses on Wang Bing’s newest film works – among them a version of his ongoing project Youth, newly conceived as an installation for the Kunstverein – which appear in the second part of the exhibition alongside photographs from his early body of work. There is no predefined narration, no directed story, in these films – everything we see follows the movements and unpredictable course of what unfolds in front of the camera in real time. As Wang Bing puts it : “For me, a story doesn’t belong to this or that literary or cinematographic tradition, but to people’s life” (from,, Conversations with Wang Bing“, Piretti Editore, 2024, p. 34). Thus, minutes, days, months, and years pass in which his whole attention is dedicated to the individuals he is portraying, and in which the camera does nothing more than listen, watch, and record. The deliberate absence of any script is the result of an artistic method in search of a non-hierarchical, open, and direct narrative form, able to approach the uncertainty and complexity of human experience with care and sensitivity. This might be an act of artistic resistance ; against the violently enforced image of (Chinese) national unity, for instance, which Wang Bing’s films bring into question by the immense geographical fragmentation of their locations alone.
