TWO OF A MIND
Both are artists who came from different backgrounds - hers, video and performance art; his, sculpture and public art - yet both by then had reached a similar point in their international careers. As with contact improv, they felt compelled to open themselves and their art to chance encounters with social situations and specific sites.
Within six months, she and Wang, who speak English to each other, had stretched their liberating, athletic dance maneuvers into experiments in making art together. They use or fuse various media, including video, site-specific installations, improvisational street performances and interactive sculpture, as needed.
The pair collaborate under the name Living Lenses.
Seeming to thrive on the creative tension between controlled and unpredictable scenarios, the magnetic team recently returned from a three-month residency at the Irish Museum of Modern Art in Dublin. There they created seven temporary projects, ranging from the conceptual "The Sound of Two Hands Clapping" to the romantic "Fiona McBride," a concocted myth that allowed a garden statue's electronic "heart" to beat when a visitor touched a sensor.
Increasingly, they undertake in-depth social and scientific research that may evolve into "works that are 'lenses' to facilitate glimpses of what might not be obvious within a specific environment," they wrote in an e-mail.
Recent work includes Wang's "Earth Song," a 42-foot-tall, red "tuning fork" in Berkeley (2002) that emits sound when activated by energies in its urban surroundings, such as wind and traffic.
Wang, who is also a sculptor, has taught art in Rome and the Bay Area. Bertelsen began her performance work during the 1980s. Her latest site-specific video, "Shadow Play," was shown in September on the BBC Big Screen, which is mounted above a street 55,000 people traverse daily in Liverpool, England.
They're now working on commissions for a San Francisco hospice and a Texas university student center, in addition to a high-profile San Diego park project. They competed against 22 teams of artists for the commission, which they were awarded in May.
Wang and Bertelsen are intrigued by an earthquake fault that lies beneath part of the San Diego park and will propose a piece that invites people to explore and "sense" the fault. The fault line is the reason that a park, instead of tall buildings, is to be constructed in downtown San Diego.
"We are using this project as a seed to plant back into society," Wang said recently in the sun-splashed apartment he shares with Bertelsen. "Not every public art project offers this opportunity. This is very inspiring! It's giving us a lot of energy to connect."
"Connect," Bertelsen broke in, "to something bigger than us. We humans try to control everything. We can't control everything. An earthquake is actually the earth responding to natural forces. We have to find a way to live with it."
PRIMAL DIALOGUE
She and Wang seem to live in the moment, yet express a reverence for certain eternal "truths," such as nature's renewing cycles, geophysical plate tectonics and the Earth's "song," oscillations they make audible to humans.
Their interactive works invite investigation. "We hope to share the experience (of a place or subject) through explorations, which is so much of why we love to do art in the first place," they wrote in an e-mail.
Bertelsen and Wang have thrown themselves into San Diego research, investigating multiple gamelike strategies for large-scale, participatory art without encroaching on the park's open lawn. Using the latest scientific findings, they've pursued experts and sources of specialized or adaptable technology, and wrestled with the realities of the project's modest budget - $160,000 for design, fabrication and installation - and tight design schedule.
They've bounced some of their ideas off city staff and Martin Poirier, the park's chief designer, and his associate, Ilisa Goldman, of Spurlock Poirier Landscape Architects.
"Your idea of pursuing the fault line as a means to 'a primal dialogue with this very environment' is a poetic expression of what we felt when we learned of its existence," Poirier wrote to the artists in an e-mail.
The artists also considered diverse comments from members of the downtown neighborhood, including other artists, residents and business owners, who attended meetings or communicated their desires for the park and public art in writing.
Wang views the public art process as one of flexibility and mingling of public input and the artists' ideas.
"I don't think we have an urgent aesthetic message that can't be altered," he said, reinforcing their predisposition to respond to a site's physical conditions, history and culture.
"You take in (all the public comment) because they are going to live with (the results)," Bertelsen said. "We hope our project will be satisfactory and enticing to them as well as something we believe in."
Professionally, the pair seem perfectly matched: articulate, enthusiastic, intense and quick to smile. But Bertelsen points out, "We're two people and we're very different." They continue to work on art individually as well as together.
"When we collaborate, if one of us is not convinced (that we have the best solution), we keep on working," she added. "We help each other and we challenge each other. In the end, we agree, this (approach) is correct."
They try to think of everything that could affect public art, from the sun overheating a metal playground fence to wheelchair access and how vandals could break parts of their artwork. Sometimes they abandon their computers and research files to brainstorm at a sunny sidewalk table at a neighborhood cafe.
"The thing about public art is even though this project is in the schematic design phase, we have to know how the piece is going to work," Wang noted, reinforcing his point with some starkly technical drawings displayed on his computer screen.
SIMPLE LIVING
Wang and Bertelsen's passion for working in the public realm is infectious. When they've previously discussed their work, which often marries art and science, whimsy and mechanics, in San Diego, they seemed to carry their audiences along with them, sailing through abstract and sensory terrain.
After meetings with the city's Public Art Committee, residents, business owners, developers and a technical advisory panel, they expect to return to their matching, pristine-white Apple computers armed with fresh feedback and insights. They'll enter the final design phase, refining or revising their proposal in their sparsely furnished living room that doubles as their office and wood-floored dance space.
Their apartment is like thousands of others in California, yet they've made it unique and keep it spare and spotless. Preferring to live simply, they rescue most of their furniture from the street, such as small tables they use as desks and an elaborate mirror they repaired by carving a sculptural piece that added their aesthetic mark to the frame.
"When we're finished with a piece of furniture, we put it back out on the street for someone else to use," Wang said, smiling.
They added wheels to a fancy wooden wine crate, making a rolling coffee table with storage space below, and created a funky wall clock from salvaged clock parts covered by a large, clear dome that was originally a wok lid.
They bought a wall-sized set of copper-colored lockers "so we don't have to look at all our stuff," Wang said. Its doors are unlabeled, but they know what's hidden behind them: shoes and skates along the bottom row, kitchen tools near the stove, and perhaps, most important, the phone and electronics in the middle.
Wang likes to keep the front door and nearby sliding-glass doors open to bring in fresh air and maximum natural light. His desk, a scuffed table nearly covered by his computer, faces the outdoors.
On the opposite side of the room, Bertelsen's desk, also recycled, is similar in size, appearance and tidiness to Wang's, but its placement against a solid wall allows her to work with few distractions, her back to Wang. She sometimes trades her chair for a bouncy perch on a large, blue exercise ball. She gestures toward "our only decoration in the house": five color computer printouts, all drawings of the San Diego park project, hung neatly on the wall next to her desk.
TAKING RISKS
Not surprisingly, their work and domestic lives are intertwined. They send joint e-mails, signed Living Lenses, and continue "placing our bodies as lenses in the environment," Bertelsen said. They can be impulsive and as surprised by their actions as the unsuspecting passers-by.
"We don't know what's happening," Wang added. Nor do they know how people will react when, say, he climbs a wall and lodges himself in a giant lantern, or she drapes herself around pay phones or together they fall backward, fully clothed, into an unexpectedly ice-cold river. They've coined a word for these public events - "improperbavisations" - and they've documented them in photographs that appear on their Web site ( www.livinglenses.com) and a paperback book published in Rome.
"They belong to that category of artist who are not afraid of letting go of their ego, and who ... accept (being) a vehicle, a conduit, but also a component in a dialogue," artist Jacopo Benci wrote in the book's preface.
During three months in 2000, the pair regularly climbed a Berkeley magnolia tree. At first it was difficult and painful, Wang recalled. But the more they practiced this physical and mental exercise, the better they got to know the tree, limb for limb. Eventually, they could "drift down" to the ground, as they put it, through the branches head first.
"People saw us doing this and asked if we were OK," Bertelsen said with amusement. Others asked if they could take a class in this inverted art form that had the artists blurring distinctions between their own limbs and trunks and the magnolia's.
If one of them doesn't feel like working on an art project one day, then he or she can cook dinner instead. Most mornings, Bertelsen and Wang ride their bikes to a nearby volleyball field, where they dance for fun and head-clearing exercise.
Discovering connections between people, ideas, places and events seems to come naturally to this curious pair, who share a playful openness to what life may bring. Yes, they'll present their proposal, but don't expect all of its mystery to vanish.
"It's not so interesting for us to say what the work is about," Wang said. "We hope to trigger the imagination."
"Trigger," Bertelsen chimed in, "the playfulness."
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