The Friends of K20 K21 and the Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen are delighted to announce this year’s winner of the K21 Global Art Award, Wang Tuo (*1984 in Changchun, China). The award includes the purchase of the multi-channel video installation The Second Interrogation (2022), which will be on view at K21 from May 24, 2024. The purchasing jury thus decided in favor of the artist nominated by Doryun Chong (Deputy Director and Chief Curator of M+ in Hong Kong).

Wang Tuo´s two-part video installation The Second Interrogation consists of an intergenerational dialogue about the premises for creating art. It is concerned with the freedom of art, the freedom of artists, as well as how art is bound to its specific historical and political situation. Should art be explained in light of the situation, or does art define the situation anew? Is it merely a mirror of its times, or is it a motor of social development? Wang Tuo discusses these fundamental issues from his own perspective, which is to say that of an artist working in China today.

To this end, in the first part he takes two fictional characters: a successful contemporary Chinese artist and a long-standing employee of the state censorship board. A conversation develops between them in which it is evident that both are experts on contemporary art practice, each in their own way. Due to their respective roles in the system, the diverging positions of the two protagonists appear on first sight clearly set out. Yet in the course of conversation it becomes apparent that it is the artist whose art - even if it sometimes appears critical – serves to stabilize the social and political system. The censor, on the other hand, proves in fact to be the one who levels a critique at society during the conversation, who insists on the freedom of art and agrees that it should not merely stabilize but also change society. The artist now appears to become the censor and the censor the advocate of art.

In the second part, the fictional artist is seen working on a contemporary reinterpretation of a performance series from 1989, which took place at the National Art Museum in Beijing as part of the China/Avant-Garde exhibition. The authorities promptly closed the exhibition – from which they had explicitly banned performance art – after the artist Xiao Lu shot twice at her own work with a pistol. In a parallel plot, the ghosts of two artists who committed suicide at different times discuss the significance of the past for the present. The year 1989 thus becomes the culminating point of the work. It marks both the beginning of a stricter crackdown on the freedom of contemporary art , and an abrupt end to the pro-democracy movement in Beijing.

While Wang Tuo´s previous video work “The Interrogation” (2017) was indeed about police interrogation techniques, “The Second Interrogation” is about an internal process of self-examination within the art system. While the play between the different levels on which the protagonists enact their roles might be strongly colored by the current social climate in China, the question of how far artists honestly reveal their motives, the extent to which they are truly criticizing society or simply acting as if, concerns the entire field of international contemporary art. And once again the question arises as to whether and in what form an artist is merely acting within the art system, or whether he or she is breaking the mould. In other words, whether their art is merely a reflection of the historical situation, or whether it defines a new one - and thus whether it makes a difference or not.