ART CITIES: Beijing-Wu Xiaojun
Wu Xiaojun was an important figure in the conceptual photography movement in the 1990s, when he created clay figures staged them in politically minded fictional scenarios in his photographs. Since 2000, Wu has shifted the focus of his practice towards making sculptures that employ a wealth of materials from animal bone ashes to grounded pill powder as well as site-specific neon-light installations, often involving texts and words.
By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Magician Space Archive
Wu Xiaojun’s works reference and reinterpret a variety of news events, in an attempt to question and stretch our social and political experiences and perceptions. Despite the critical nature of his view, the materialization of his visions is often emotional and even transcendent.
Magician Space Antechamber presents its third project, “The Incomplete Beginning: Notes on 2025”, in collaboration with Wu Xiaojun. Inaugurated at the end of 2025, this project reviews the past year while revisiting the year 2008, when Wu presented the exhibition “2025 Project “at Magician Space.
Both projects take Jeffrey Sachs’s “The End of Poverty”—a 2005 book proposing 2025 as the endpoint for extreme poverty—as their point of departure. When the book was translated into Chinese in 2007, Wu interpreted it as a form of post–Cold War positivism unfolding under the wave of globalization. In response to Sachs’s proposition, Wu created a manifesto-style neon work that reads, “One person earns one dollar a day by 2025,” to warn against the fantasy of an unduly promising future.
Once a magazine editor, Wu often uses people’s opinions and current events as artistic material to create works that serve as reminders of reality. In his neon manifesto of “2025 project,” he poses a question: Does economic growth also lead to stronger self-consciousness? Seventeen years later, when Wu re-presents the manifesto in a Cold War–era ammunition box and buries it in bone meal, he suggests that the historical specter of the Cold War, which once crushed lives, has not been laid to rest. Through news and events around the world today, it is not difficult to recognize that people had never truly escaped the unavoidable upheaval followed the collapse of grand political systems, exactly as Svetlana Alexievich described in her book “Secondhand Time” (2015).
Over the course of the project period, Wu will gradually insert found objects and quoted fragments of speech into the exhibition space. In doing so, he gathers a form of second-hand time, constructing a community grounded in an alternative time zone of politics. Such juxtaposition allows these once-lived experiences to communicate, cooperate, and contradict one another while articulating and manifesting their own narratives. The continuously growing nature of the project places standardized values, narratives of progress, the violence inherent in scalability, and self-exploitation under the regime of modern time in provisional suspension. Perhaps in the end, time can ultimately be returned to those second-hand destinies that were previously negated, dispossessed, or put on hold, and may even call for the return of labor and solidarity.
Photo: Wu Xiaojun, The Incomplete Beginning: Notes on 2025, Exhibition view, Magician Space-Breijing, 2025, Courtesy the artist and Magician Space
Info: Magician Space, 798 Art Zone, 2 Jiuxianqiao Road, Chaoyang District, Beijing, China, Duration: 6/12/2025-30/4/2026, Days & Hurs: Tue-Sat 10:30-18:30, https://magician.space/
