WORK / LIVE 干活 Wei Chengcheng 魏成成

Wei Chengcheng 魏成成 is a worker-operator at Bernard Controls China. He took an active part in the activities of the Social Sensibility R&D Department from 2011 and has been a practising artist since 2016. This work, charged with real and symbolic meaning, belongs to the territory he chose to explore, where art and daily life merge, brutally and poetically.

Money and objects had been disappearing from his flat: he had the feeling that a thief was getting in while he and his wife were out, carefully taking small amounts day after day. Inspired, in his own words, by his discovery of art, Chengcheng discussed with the department’s artists, Alessandro Rolandi and Tianji Zhao, the possibility of turning the situation into a work. He had a hidden security camera installed and connected to his mobile phone, to film the intruder and catch him in the act.

When it happened and he saw the man on his phone screen, entering the flat and moving so carefully, he felt a strange empathy and complicity with him, watching his skilful, subtle behaviour and the rhythm of his gestures. He says he perceived a powerful mix of beauty, survival instinct and necessity – the stuff, he believes, that life itself is made of – and that the idea of making art from this dramatic moment allowed him to accept it, despite the damage. At one point he spoke to the thief through the camera, not to frighten or threaten him, but to ask whether he would like to have tea and a chat. The thief got scared and ran away.

Chengcheng conceived the video in two versions: as a single piece and as a sequence of eight very short moments. Turning such a traumatic and emotionally dangerous situation into a work is a powerful, transformative act. Rather than anger at a man who threatened his limited income and his privacy, he chose interest in the intruder and his condition. Processing the event through the language of conceptual art let him go beyond the legitimate feelings of rage and revenge and recast it as a brilliant, humorous and dark critique of a socio-economic system that leads people to steal from one another – something Charlie Chaplin might have imagined for a tragicomic sketch, made here in a far more radical and direct way.

By witnessing a problematic event in real time and responding in a way that is both compassionate and emancipatory, he merges art and life in the moment, without self-indulgence or naivety, and challenges the status quo to face its own contradictions. The work was shown at Cache Space in Beijing’s 798 district in February 2017.