Walking towards the Guggenheim for the first time, the first piece of art I noticed was not Jianwei’s Time Temple but the architecture of the Guggenheim Museum designed by Frank Lloyd Wright. The building from the outside has a cylindrical shape with the rings increasing in width from bottom to top, and the building itself look likes a sculpture. Going inside, the levels of the building combined is one continuous spiral. What I liked about this design was that the works of art were displayed in the open (I could see a piece of work looking at it from a floor above) and you see each piece of art as you transition from the bottom to the top of the spiral.

After staring at the architecture of the Guggenheim, our group was taken into a room and we began looking at Time Temple.

The installation was composed of sculptures and paintings. For the sculptures, the aspect that caught my interest was the hundreds of cuts made into each wooden block. Not only were there many cuts, but each cut was different in angle and size creating this complex and highly precise sculpture. I learned later from our tour guide that Jianwei did not plan out every cut from the beginning rather the process for Jianwei was gradual. He did not have an idea what the sculptures were going to look like in the end. Rather, Jianwei made cuts into the wood everyday until he was satisfied with how the sculpture looked. For a person like me who plans and outlines, learning of Jianwei’s approach to creating these sculptures was surprising and at the same time fascinating.

For the paintings, the one that caught my eye was this one with a bright orange background surrounding something that resembled a microscopic cell or organism. What was interesting about this painting was how Jianwei used different types of paints to present a message on time. In contrast to the bright orange and yellow, the black is oil paint and the oil paint represents ancient China when most paintings were black and white oil paintings while the orange and yellow represents modern China. Through the juxtaposition of these colors, Jianwei presents a message about convention in modern China and a message about the movement of time.

Overall, Wang Jianwei’s Time Temple was an unique and interesting installation. The abstraction of the sculptors and the paintings matched perfectly with the main topic, time, which is also a concept that is full of abstract point of  views.