Boers-Li

"Wormhole"

Dates: 7th Nov.-13th Dec. 2009
Time: Tuesday – Sunday 11:00 – 18:00
Opening: 7th Nov. 2009, 4pm
Place: Boers-Li Gallery, Caochangdi No. A-8

Boers-Li Gallery is pleased to announce that Wang Yuyang will be featured in the next solo exhibition. Entitled Wormhole, the exhibition will open to the public on 7th Nov. and will run through 13th Dec. Wormhole is conceived as a total-installation, including new works and some older works, all of which negotiate the realms of history, media, synthetic realities and self-identity.

Wang Yuyang was born in 1979 in Harbin, Heilongjiang province and currently lives and works in Beijing. He is best known for his skeptical explorations of the social power of new media and the role of the totemic object in contemporary life. Though his work has been widely included in international group exhibitions in recent years, this solo exhibition will show his artistic position comprehensively and conceptually mature. The exhibition will include installation, photography, and video in the works Tonight I Will Consider Who I Am, Dust is Dust, Artificial Moon, and The Moon-Landing Program, as well as new work commissioned specially for this exhibition Electricity and Emblazonry.

In the 2007 piece Moon-Landing Program, Wang Yuyang meticulously constructs a dramatic set that mimics the opening moments of mankind’s presence on the moon, while other elements of the installation reconstruct the media refractions of that era. The piece critiques the spectacular and theatrical elements of historical memory while reveling in the details of media preservation, creating an ambiguous primal scene for the art of the contemporary. These themes are continued in the 2008 work Tonight I Will Consider Who I Am, which takes its title from Henry Miller’s commentary on Nietzsche, referring to an individual “lonely, nameless, without his motherland.” Here, Wang Yuyang recreates a lunar landscape dominated by the wreckage of a landing vessel and populated only by a cold blue flame and a single astronaut—an individual so far removed from the familiar that new modes of contemplation may be achieved. The object of the moon figures prominently again in Artificial Moon, a four-meter globe composed of all varieties of light bulbs. Creating a relationship of speculated distance from the intimacy of the other two lunar scenes, this visually stunning sculpture calls attention to the changing roles of technology and environment in a poetically ambiguous monument to the present. Occupying the entrance to the gallery, this work is a “rite of passage”, or a provocative act to clean the mind by an over dose of intense light.

In this solo exhibition Wang Yuyang also presents two new pieces titled Electricity and Emblazonry. Electricity uses the technology of medical science, transforming the activity of the artist’s brain into the electric power of one battery. Emblazonry melds male and female organs into one symbol of fashion and design. These two installations differ from former works of Wang Yuyang that focus on revised science, technology and experience. These new works concretize physical self-identity and the worship of science and technology, becoming a totem of contemporary society, creating a counterfeit atmosphere of suspicion.

New media curator Li Zhenhua, a long-time supporter of Wang Yuyang, also contributes to the exhibition, entitling it Wormhole. In physics, a wormhole is a hypothetical topological feature that is fundamentally a 'shortcut' through space and time, supporting the possibility of time travel. In this exhibition, Wormhole calls attention to Wang Yuyang’s flexible language and original subject-matter.