

Title: Farmer Du Wenda's Flying Saucer
Date: 2005
Medium: Steel, aluminum, cardboard, V8 engine, tires, plexiglass, wire,
tubing and workshop
Du Wenda, a farmer from Anhui Province of China, spent several years in earnest building a flying saucer with local farmers that made national news. The artists invited the creator of the primitive flying object, which has never flown, to assemble and test fly his work in Venice. The differing motives behind the artists' and the farmer's desire for the test to succeed made their collaboration complex, codependent and contentious, and this dynamic became integral to the artwork. Farmer Du Wenda's Flying Saucer is a dramatic experiment that parallels the unknowns in China's open future