Entering the gallery space, the viewer finds only a sketchily drafted map or travel itinerary painted directly onto the wall surface. In the small room behind, a short video loops continuously. Through this documentation it emerges that, for the opening of the exhibition, the artist arranged several buses to take visitors to a snowy, barren corner of the Huantie area some distance from his studio; this was purportedly a quest to discover a fairy that appeared to Wang Sishun in a dream against the background of this same geographic space. In the accompanying textual materials, he describes the dream as a “Top of dopamine,” claiming that the exhibition should offer to the audience a “wonderful dream that compensates for reality.”

The project does not lend itself to close reading, although it does appear to sit more easily with Wang Sishun’s conception of a given action as split between psychological state and literary genre than with his politics of labor. The conceptual move is interesting: the presentation of a psychology not as content but as genre.

(Robin Peckham,  Wang Sishun and Emotional Utopia, 2010[Excerpt])