Wang Bing: The Weight of the Invisible

Part I: March 15–May 25, 2025
Part II: June 7–August 24, 2025

Artist talk with Wang Bing: March 15, 6–8pm
​Masterclass with Wang Bing: March 16, 12–5pm, Filmwerkstatt Düsseldorf, Birkenstrasse 47, 40233 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.

Wang Bing’s films are more physical than verbal, and even when words are spoken, they seem to hold and hint at something that is difficult or impossible to capture in language – or for which language has been made forbidden and forgotten. Glances, gestures, and moments of hesitation, pausing, and observation often seem to be far more significant and meaningful than what is made explicit. It is through this stoic attentiveness for the silent presence of the body, for the slow passing of the hours, and for the physical details of our surroundings that Wang Bing renders the vulnerability and dignity of human existence visible. Expanding outward from the supposedly banal, his films touch upon the material realities of precarity, state violence, and deprivation. They show the world in a raw, concrete, and physical state – it becomes visible and audible, its weight and resistance tangible. The relationship between the individual and their material environment reveals itself to be complicated and contradictory; at times it is a place of refuge and an accomplice, at others an obstacle, a source of friction and opposition.

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.

Wang Bing’s connection to the world as a filmmaker, which simultaneously describes an ethical and political stance, manifests itself in the way in which he abandons control and delivers himself to life as it appears before him. His work is an attempt to get as close as possible to material reality, without commenting on it or pre-defining its direction. It is particularly in the duration and temporal dimension of his films that this dedication reveals itself: duration becomes density here, an almost physical mass that describes a sort of embodied cinema and way of being in the world that is based on the elementary, granular, and corporeal.

The exhibition will be accompanied by an artist talk with Wang Bing at the Kunstverein on March 15, 2025, and a master class organized in cooperation with the Filmwerkstatt Düsseldorf will be held on March 16, 2025 (registration required). Simultaneous interpretation into English will be provided for both events.

Curated by Kathrin Bentele.

Our special thanks go to Wang Bing’s longstanding collaborator and producer, Lihong Kong.

Wang Bing was born in 1967 in Xi’an in the Chinese province of Shaanxi. He studied photography and cinematography at the Lu Xun Academy of Fine Arts in Shenyang and the Beijing Film Academy. He then worked for some time for television before beginning his career as an independent filmmaker in 1998. His debut film, the nine-hour documentary West of the Tracks / Tie Xi Qu (2002), gained immediate international attention and established Wang Bing as an important figure in contemporary Chinese cinema. Until today, he has directed numerous documentary films such as Fengming, A Chinese Memoir / He Fengming (2007); Crude Oil / Yuan You (2008); The Ditch / Jiabiangou (2010); Man with No Name / Wu Ming Zhe (2010); Three Sisters / San Zimei (2012); Ta’ang (2016), or Dead Souls / Si Ling Hun (2018) amongst others, which were presented at international film festivals, in Cannes, Venice, New York, Berlin, or Locarno. In 2017, his film Mrs. Fang / Fang Xiu Ying (2017) won the Golden Leopard at the Locarno Film Festival. His video installation 15 Hours / Shi Wu Xiao Shi (2017) premiered at documenta14 in Kassel. Recent solo exhibitions of the artist include Cercle Cité, Luxembourg (2024); LE BAL, Paris (2021); Kunsthalle Zürich (2018–2019); CCA Wattis Institute, San Francisco (2016), and Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris (2014). His works have joined several public collections, among them Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid; M+, Hong Kong; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; EMST – National Museum of Contemporary Art, Athens, and CNAP, Paris. Wang Bing is the recipient of numerous prizes and honors, such as the Chanel Next Prize, Paris (2021); the International Human Rights Film Award at the Nuremberg International Human Rights Film Festival (2017), or the EYE Art & Film Prize, Amsterdam (2017). In 2006, he was awarded the French National Order of Merit (Légion d’honneur). Wang Bing was a visiting artist-professor at Le Fresnoy – Studio national des arts contemporains in Tourcoing, France (2018–2019).

The exhibition is funded by Kunststiftung NRW, Institut Français Deutschland / Bureau des arts plastiques, Kunst- und Kulturstiftung der Stadtsparkasse Düsseldorf, Sparkassen-Kulturstiftung Rheinland, and Trampoline, Association in support of the French art scene, Paris.