ADDICTED

Image still from Addicted ©Wang Tuo 2017              Password: wangtuo

Addicted (2017) by Wang Tuo invited 12 commercial actors and actresses to recreate a Vanity Fair magazine cover photoshoot while performing their usual advertising roles. As the camera moves, each delivers a brief yet intimate monologue, revealing anxieties about their bodies, minds, and lifestyles. In rigid poses, they appear composed yet internally distressed. Viewers gradually realise they are attending an addiction recovery meeting, reminiscent of Alcoholics Anonymous. The actors’ confessions are juxtaposed with Dutch Golden Age group portraits, bridging past and present through the aesthetics of 'schuttersstuk' and 'regentenstuk'.

Wang Tuo blends history, cultural archives, fiction, and mythology into speculative narratives. Comparing his practice to novel writing, he reinterprets historical texts and archives, crafting stories that blur fact and imagination. Through film, performance, painting, and drawing, he critically examines modern Chinese and East Asian history. His multidimensional chronologies, filled with visible and hidden clues, expose underlying cultural and historical forces. Embracing a uniquely Chinese hauntology, he introduces “pan-shamanisation” to unearth suppressed memories of 20th-century China and East Asia. Often unsettling and dramatic, his work explores collective trauma and censorship, highlighting tensions between artistic expression and authority.