Chinese Visual Festival

Objects of Fantasy is the first UK solo exhibition of work by Wang Yuyang, one of China’s most promising emerging artists. The exhibition ranges from new media work to installation, selected from Wang’s recent practice.

The artworks in this exhibition are derived from Wang’s experience of daily routine, making mute, humble objects speak and breathe, revealing human histories and emotions and permitting glimpses of the world from radically different perspectives.

A Painting—Landscape (2010) challenges our perception of painting and mobilizes the encounter between the artwork and its audiences. With coloured patches derived from the painting sprawled on the gallery walls and floor, audiences can only discover the initial context through the faint vestiges left on the canvas. By disintegrating a landscape painting into abstract pieces Wang activates the exhibition space, inspiring audiences to bodily navigate the art and reflect on the process of creation.

Our consumerist society impels us to continuously purchase the new and replace the old. However, in Breath (2006), Wang infuses second-hand objects such as a television and a mobile phone with life, rendering them as vital, breathing organisms and prompting us to reconsider modern commodity culture.

Wang’s application of science and technology to his artistic concept of revealing the invisible concealed in mundane objects is manifest in Electricity (2007), where the electrical activity of Wang’s brain is encapsulated in a tiny battery.

Since 2010, Wang has been attaching significance to the production process of ordinary objects such as tapes, films and paper, to create new works. The Narrative of a Stack of Paper (2012) records the meticulous process of papermaking, in which huge quantities of mulberry bark cuttings are transformed into paper. Using digital printing, a heavy stack of nearly 1000 sheets of paper, normally used to record visible images or literal scripts of ‘other things’, starts to tell its own life story.

This exhibition is part of the Chinese Visual Festival presented by King’s Cultural Institute, King’s College London. The event showcases Chinese creativity through film, contemporary art, music and more, produced by China Culture Connect in collaboration with Tang Contemporary Art Center, King’s College London Lau China Institute and Departments of Film Studies and Culture, Media & Creative Industries and the School of Arts & Humanities.