All goods have two functions: they are used or owned by human beings. In extreme cases, only those with practical functions will have social identities: that’s a machine. On the contrary, the pure object itself, deprived of function or abstracted from its use, has a completely subjective identity: it becomes a collection.
——Jean Baudrillard

Digressed from natural science, the value of specimen is unquestionably more inclined to the second function of Baudrillard’s so-called goods. It is regarded as a collection and a “natural object” to be observed. The display based on possession becomes the explicit expression of the power and desire of the owner at this time. It is like the treasure Pavilion and the museum during embryonic period of eighteenth and nineteenth Century, among which “the objects” in various colonies reflect the strength and desire of the advanced countries to control the other nation. The appearance of the times can be visualized clearly from the specimens of sociological significance.
When Xiaoshuang Wang introduced the content of his works from the urban landscape to the ruins, the two series of works began to generate sequence of creation and the two various images form a mutual reflection. From the realization of sequence relation and inter-textual meaning, the value of specimens can be implicated as an object of his works.
Just as Baudrillard considered “collection” under the condition of “things” first, it is the premise that the two series of Wang Xiaoshuang’s works can introduce the concept of “specimen”. Actually, the creation of the first stage of urban themes is based on the form of “scenery”. But we need to notice that the location of “scenery” is extremely vague. Apart from the few urban landscapes of landmark buildings, such as Shanghai and Paris, most of the city’s landscape in his works is rather a scene of painting, but the content carrier to display the collection of “objects” based on the artist’s personal painting techniques. Similarly, the ruins are also a kind of scenery, but when their creation enters this stage, the “Scene” that still exists in the original theme of the city are no longer part of the picture. The concept of “image” for the ruins is emphasized repeatedly in the form of full amplitude and abstract language, thus achieving the effect of “express inside content without appearance.” The concept of these two kinds of objects is a specimen extraction of two extreme things in current society, the former is one of the most expensive consumer goods – the building, the latter is the most valuable production surplus – garbage.
In 《landscape society》of Guy Debord stated that “in a society where modern production conditions prevail, all life has shown itself as a huge accumulation of landscape. Everything in life has been transformed into a landscape. “The aggregation of architecture undoubtedly points to the creation of urban landscape. As far as the current development of Chinese cities is concerned, the rapid development of pervious thirty years leads to the dramatic reconstruction of urban buildings. The continuous renewal of the city scenery has become the scenic feature of large cities represented by Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou. Meanwhile the various visual images caused by it provide an endless source of inspiration for the artists’ creation. Under this circumstance, Xiaoshuang Wang’s description of urban architecture is far more different from the meaning of so-called landscape painting. In his urban works, the rectangular structure representing the outline of the mono architecture has become a symbol that combined into the motif of the painting. It reduces the recognition of the landscape attributed from the visual language and then highlights the integrity of the “landscape” significance, which finally achieves the effect of replacing landscape with scenery. The emphasis on building as a substance is essentially what it is on consumption attributes as well as on its landscape attributes. From the academic point of view, the criticism of de Po to the landscape society is in line with Marx’s criticism of commodity fetishism. The abundance of goods and the development of electronic images cause the modern society aggregated by consumer images, which constitute an unavoidable commodity landscape and make up consumers’ desire and illusion. Thus the fetishism of commodities has been turned into a fetishism of the landscape. Xiaoshuang Wang’s attention to the urban landscape is the scenery itself. The urban architecture in his works is also an object of consumer goods. From the features of his art works, he mainly focus on modular architecture, dim hue, and distant perspective which indicates that the artist seeks to express an unfamiliar, indifferent and distant sense of art. Even in the face of a city that has been living for a long time, there could still been found a critical attitude of the artist which worth appreciation. Such a negative attitude is a negation of the excessive development of the consumer society as well as the excessive expansion of personal desire.
Xiaoshuang Wang’s recent works turn the objects depicted from the urban landscape to ruins, and named it “city ruins” series. The so-called “city ruins”, as the name suggests, shows the ruins of the city or the ruins after the collapse of the city. But no matter what kind of explanation, the critical attitude of artists in this series is more straightforward by the objects described. As mentioned above, “city ruins” can also be a kind of scenery. After all, the precedent of creating ruins as motif is too numerous to mention in art history. But Xiaoshuang Wang’s performance of “ruins” once again exceeded the scope of traditional landscapes. He generates a new perspective with the dimension of “matter” in the contemporary sense. Compared with the previous series of cities with scenic traces, the works of ruins are directly involved in the creation of objects from the aspect of objects themselves. He just painted without any distraction of current society and face the ruins by heart.
The city series is more or less reserved some space for the audience to read the text. After all, in some of his works can also distinguish the city’s landmark buildings and even the river bank. But the ruins of the series just leave pure “scenery” which refers to the gaze of a fetish. The gaze can be regarded as “the way of watching with power operation or desire entanglement” (Floyd).” This type of watch is not only possessed by a Fetish but owned by most of the people in visual consumption. Here, the simple sense of pleasure on visual becomes the driving force to bring the desire of consumption. The purpose of consumption is no longer the use value of the goods, but the visual pleasure of human beings, forming the so-called pleasure consumption. We can say that the gaze is no longer the ruins of the artist’s depiction, but the consumer goods that have become the ruins which definitely include the architectural aggregation of the urban landscape. This is more than an artist’s further reflection and recriticism for the desire of indulgence in consumption. “Ruins” also become a “vigilant fable” as the result of the development of current acquisitive society.
Therefore, Xiaoshuang Wang’s description of ruins is essentially related to the previous urban landscape series. This connection, on the one hand, is reflected in the critical attitude of the artist to excessive consumption. And on the other hand it is embodied in a device called “building the city”. The work consists of a building module of a large number of resin molds. And each of the module contains an electronic scrap that skillfully points to both series of architectural landscapes and urban ruins at the same time. The significance of “Reconstruction” beyond the simple critical perspective reflects the artist’s social redemption complex as an intellectual. Facing the times filled with the two objects created by artists, the most expensive things that imply the extreme meaning of both extravagance and most useless are often close to each other. Such value deviation is just like a warning metaphor which reminds people in the current times to preserve their self – reflection on both wealth and desire.

Guanzhe Shi Apr 9th. 2018