Wang
Tuo

Wang Tuo’s works capture subterranean forces propelling historical change in East Asia, where societies are caught in pre-modernity and post-modernity—an entanglement that is too often left undifferentiated.

The epic Northeast Tetralogy (2018–21) takes Northeast China as its point of departure to examine the unfinished project of China’s modernization, initiated with the May Fourth Movement of 1919; the unresolved geopolitical legacies of Northeast Asia shaped, among others, by the Kuomintang–Communist Civil War; and the reverberations of these histories within contemporary social realities. What binds these strands together is the enduring dilemma faced by Chinese intellectuals, caught between opposing political poles and torn between the pursuit of individual selfhood and the imagination of society as a collective project.

Continuing with similar intensity into the present, The Second Interrogation (2022) is based on Wang’s observations on cultural censorship in the art world in China, staging a dialectical relationship between an artist and a censor in order to probe the tension between negative and positive freedom. Intensity in Ten Cities (2025) and the earlier work Obsessions (2019) return to the history of modern architecture in China. Through this lens, Wang excavates hidden truths, suppressed emotions, and sexuality, revealing how the inner structures of socialist-era architecture mirrored and shaped the collective unconscious of individuals as well as that of a nation.

The suspicion of further depth compels the artist to rip personal and collective histories apart, both intuitively and in a methodological way. In Obsessions, hypnosis and psychotherapy function as a method to access the unconscious—through which the patient imagines himself as a piece of architecture. For The Northeast Tetralogy, Wang Tuo advances the concept of “pan-shamanization,” a process whereby the bodies of people become the medium of historical consciousness, not following linear timelines but rather guided by the intensity of inexplicable experiences of struggle. Through the medium of his art, Wang induces a sense of historical delirium.

This line of artistic exploration arrives at a moment when the “end of history” has been decisively discredited. Recalling the intellectual lineage from Kojève preceding Fukuyama’s famous claim, history ends when humanity completes the project of self-recognition and self-creation, freed of our servitude to self-preservation. The end of history is a “mediated suicide,” a delirious and damning vision, one that is ultimately pitted against a postmodern sensibility of endless deconstruction, destratification, and differentiation that carefully avoids any project.

There exists a vantage point from where nothing comes as a surprise: it belongs to those who have never fully reached a sophisticated modernity, yet still seek to preserve its most vital elements; those for whom the force of Angelus Novus has long been palpable. Wang Tuo’s works allow us to glimpse the forces that drive history, transmitted like seismic tremors, as historical temporalities layer upon one another and the collective struggle for a horizon beyond self-preservation rumbles beneath the threshold of articulation.

Mi You,
a curator and professor in the Art and Economics section at Universität Kassel, works on performance philosophy and the political theory of Eurasia, amongst other topics.