For example, at last year's Taipei Biennial, Wang produced a line of MA clothes that gallery visitors could pull of the rack and try on. The installation's focus was on "clothing as interface," or how we use our wardrobes to interact with the world around us.
In the current exhibition, the central artifact is the Bibless. Wang uses it to zoom in on the problem of spiritual anxiety, a problem which in the MA paradigm is necessarily atheistic, because in a corporate universe, what other kind of spiritual anxiety could be possible?
He chooses a hotel room as the penultimate location for this existential crisis, probably for the same reason that real evangelical Christians put real Bibles in real hotels. Generic and alien, a hotel room represents a place where people tend to come detached from their normal lives. According to the Bibless, this condition pushes individuals into a "primitive lonely state" full of unfulfilled "longing for community, happiness, preoccupation, wealth and indifference."
The comic coup of the whole installation is that it is the Bibless, with its erotic stories and hotel shopping pages, that is supposed to relieve the spiritual unrest. Wang has always been adept at eliciting the fallacies of commercial, culture and virtual surrogates.
His past works have included the online travel agency Neon Urlaub, which had a real Web site where people could make real reservations on fake tours, and FOCL (For Our Consumer Loving), a company that produced a cooking show on how to make artificial food. But it is in the Bibless that the phony virtual promises of the corporate overlords seem most obviously empty.
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