Legend of the Stone

The film is a backstage look at artist Zhan Wang’s utopian project, “My Personal Universe”, created in 2012 for a show of the same name at the Ullens Center of Contemporary Art in Beijing, sponsored by Louis Vuitton. In the documentary, the director follows the wanderings undertaken by the Chinese conceptual sculptor to produce the spectacular event at the center of the pieces it comprises: the explosion of a massive boulder in Shandong province, the artist’s recreation of the birth of the Universe. This artificial Big Bang, which Wang had filmed from different angles, using six super-HD tele-cameras, at 2000 frames a second, started a multichannel video-installation and an environmental installation composed of over 7000 steel sculptures suspended in the exhibition space, each one representing a fragment of the exploded boulder. Noted for his impossible feats, such as “Mount Everest Project: To the Summit, Everest 8853.5 m” (2004) in which he scaled the lofty peak to plant a metal rock, Zhan Wang is currently among the protagonists of “Passage to History: 20 Years of La Biennale di Venezia and Chinese Contemporary Art”, a side-show of the 55th Biennale di Venezia, curated by Lü Peng and Achille Bonito Oliva.