Yuyan Wang

Yuyan Wang lives and works in Paris, FR

 

Yuyan Wang is a filmmaker and multidisciplinary artist whose work examines images at the point of production and the atmosphere cultivated by media regimes within the attention economy. Both poetic and political, her productions underscore the diversity of the effectual matrix that exists between suspense and action.

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Yuyan Wang, The Moon Also Rises, 2022, full HD-video, color, sound, approx. 20′; lighting equipment, dimensions variable, research image © Studio Drift

Her avant-garde approach to image recycling draws from sources as varied as horror movies, wellness culture, motivational programs (the so-called science of success), and other “texts” of everyday life. Wang’s appropriations are a détournement that form the basis of complex, immersive environments, inverting and subverting the functions and meanings of the images used. Employing montage, sound, and acceleration, she alternately creates focus from distraction and ambiguity from clarity.

For the 12th Berlin Biennale, Wang produced The Moon Also Rises (2022), a project comprised of a one-channel video and light installation. The work is based on a 2018 initiative in China to launch three artificial moons into orbit above major cities to provide continuous daylight. Set in an oppressively illuminated environment, the images show lethargic crowds in megacities surrounded by glowing neon lights and workers in LED factories performing repetitive tasks on an assembly line in a kind of trance state.

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Yuyan Wang, The Moon Also Rises, 2022, full HD-video, color, sound, approx. 20′; lighting equipment, dimensions variable, research image © Caters news agency

Wang depicts the imposition of relentless light as a form of capitalist authoritarianism and neocolonial control that demands ceaseless productivity, while ignoring the ecological and human damage inflicted by the renunciation of darkness. Édouard Glissant’s call for “le droit à l’opacité” (the right to opacity), a form of postcolonial resistance, inspired this project.

Noam Segal

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Yuyan Wang, The Moon Also Rises, 2022, full HD-video, color, sound, approx. 20′; lighting equipment, dimensions variable, video still © Yuyan Wang

Exhibitions

65e Salon de Montrouge, 2021, Paris (FR)

Tabula Rasa Tablet, 2021, Tabula Rasa Gallery, Beijing (CN) (online)

Panorama 22. Les sentinelles, 2020/21, Le Fresnoy – Studio national des arts contemporains, Tourcoing (FR)

Primitive People, 2018, Centre d’art Ange Leccia, Oletta (FR)

I don’t even understand, 2016, L’École nationale supérieure des beaux-arts de Paris, Paris (FR) (solo)

The guide has been rectified, 2014, Community Art Space, Hangzhou (CN) (solo)

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