  n an overcast day in Beijing, Wang Gongxin's mood is anything but dark. He raves about his new Sony digital camera, spouting off like a teenage tech-junkie. He gets giddy when you mention a camera loaded with functions, and it seems that making art videos is just an excuse to play with the latest machine.
Wang Gongxin is one of China's most respected video artists. But he insists that the gadgets are only secondary. They are simply windows into a new way of seeing the artistic world.
“I love a new device because it provides me with more possibilities, but ultimately I think the viewer should forget the hardware. Technology just lets me create a new way of perceiving.”
Wang gushes with ideas and a boyish curiosity, but the 46-year-old Beijing native also has a serious side. He grew up during one of China's most tumultuous periods, the Cultural Revolution. His says his mother raised him because his father spent much of his time in a labor camp.
“My mom and my high school art teacher encouraged me to pursue painting,” he says.
Certainly, those early years had an effect on the art that Wang produces. Pi Li, the Beijing based art critic, says it helps create complex works.
 "His work doesn't escape reality, but many of his pieces make reality just a little lighter," Pi Li says. "Let's say you take an object here on this table. Wang Gongxin removes the table so the object floats in mid-air. He reverses reality, with a bit of strangeness, but he’s no escapist."
Pieces like "Er Guo Tou," which appeared earlier this year at New Long March Space in Beijing, do make reality lighter.
In Wang's video, a pudgy man dances around in a desert landscape, naked from the waist up. He clasps a green bottle of booze and bounces around like a porpoise, his grin unstoppable and wide.
"I originally filmed the piece using me as the drunken dancer," Wang Gongxin says laughing. "But then my wife and son said that our driver could do a better job and he looked better too."
At times though, a subtle complexity enters his work, making a piece slightly more serious and a little more difficult to read. In "Karaoke" (2000), for instance, a man opens his mouth to reveal a full chorus of singers – one singer on each tooth.
 The mouth is by turns disgusting and absurd; but the voices of the singers are muted, eerily, as if are singing in a room at the end of the hall.
This otherwise mundane ritual happens within an odd theatre of discolored gums and a slightly unshaven face. Other pieces, equally ambiguous, peer into the rawness of both inner and physical realities. In pieces like "The Face"(1998), you can see video of a man's face transforming over time.
Wang Gongxin's technological tinkering might be fun and games for the artist, but one can't view the man's strangely contorted face without grimacing. The face eventually decomposes and becomes the sea, a transformation that is anything but beautiful.
Some works are intensely physical, leading the viewer to an internal response. "One of Wang Gongxin's early works, "The Old Bench"(1997), still leaves a long-lasting impression on me," says the art critic, Britta Erickson, an independent curator who has taught at Stanford University. "This piece is very simple: it consists of an old wooden bench with a small video monitor set into it, displaying the image of a finger scratching the wood. When I think of this piece, I still feel a splinter under my fingernail."
In 1982, Wang Gongxin took a bachelor in arts at Beijing's Capital Normal University. He taught oil painting at his alma mater for the next five years before moving to the United States in 1987 with his wife, the artist Lin Tianmiao.
 In the United States, Wang studied art at the State University of New York in Cortland and Lin Tianmiao did freelance work in textile design.
During the summers, Wang says he did odd jobs to make ends meet. "I even painted passers-by for a few bucks. That's how I met Ai Wei Wei. He was on the street painting people too, like me and everybody else," Wang says.
Once Lin Tianmiao's freelance business picked up, Wang Gongxin could afford to stop doing street portraits. The couple even found studio space in the city.
"After we got the space, I started painting again. But I didn't paint in my old style anymore using realism," Wang says. "My work had become more abstract."
By 1994, he and Lin Tianmiao started making trips back to Beijing. And Wang Gongxin says he decided to drop the paint brush in favor of installation work because he felt that, as a painter at least, he couldn't find a new approach.
After the couple returned to China, Wang made his first video, "The Brooklyn Sky"(1995) as part of an installation he set up inside his Beijing courtyard home.
 Wang had recorded his former view of the sky from his apartment rooftop in Brooklyn. Back in Beijing, he placed a monitor running his footage of the "Brooklyn sky" down below the floor.
Playing on an American saying that if you dig deep enough you will reach China, the piece expressed Wang's nostalgia for Brooklyn, but also suggested a new exchange of information between China and the West.
"I wanted to find a way to link my two homes, to cross the barrier between two worlds," he says.
Zhang Peili was the earliest pioneer of video art in China. And Wang Gongxin, art experts say, helped advance the movement in China.
"Wang Gongxin brought two things to Chinese contemporary art," says Pi Li. "The first is that he emphasized technique. And the second thing he brought was a logical method for bringing a concept into reality. He is a very precise artist."
Britta Erickson adds, "Wang Gongxin's importance to Chinese video art cannot be overstated. Beyond the dry wit and surprising insights he brings to his work, he is the first artist in China to create video entirely through digital editing."
 She added: " 'Here? Or There?'(2002), produced in collaboration with Lin Tianmiao, is one of the most important works of the past few years, rare in its flawless execution and compellingly complete presentation of a strange other world."
Wang Gongxin is humble about his works. "I just want to constantly find a new way to make video," he says. "I don't want to make a Hollywood film." Then, he adds, "But most of all I want to find a unique image in life – I want to take risks."
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