As a multimedia theatre, Welcome to the Desert of the Real was featured at Zürcher Theater Spektakel in 2010 with seven performances touring Zurich, Basel, and Geneva. As a five-channel HD video installation, it was shown at Sharjah Biennial 11 in 2013.

Wang Jianwei’s work is inspired by Slavoj Žižek’s book of the same name – a quote from the 1999 film The Matrix that echoes Jean Beaudrillard’s influential treatise Simulacra and Simulation.

The starting point is the true story of a sixteen-year-old boy who moved with his family from a small Chinese village to the city. The teenager struggles to maintain his identity among the urban crowds, and gradually escapes into the virtual reality of online gaming, until he can no longer distinguish between fantasy and real life. Other videos relate tales of a street vendor who dies in her home, an indifferent middle-aged man, an unexpected incident in an Internet café and the mental breakdown of a cyclist. Connections occur between the boy and these other characters, questioning the boundaries between the real and the imagined.