The solo exhibition by Wang Yizhou entitled “Insight” opened at the 2nd floor of Building No.1, Today Art Museum on January 30, 2016. Planned by the curator Huang Du, the exhibition is the first large-scale installation exhibition of the aritst. The exhibition is themed “insight”, referring to the artists who do not only subvert the ordinary visual order in a physical space, but also show an attempt to transform the state of things in the conceptual stage, the use of the soft rice paper as the artistic medium turns it into the inverted three-dimension landscape, which presents a “displaced” installation.
Wang Yizhou was born in Jiangsu province in 1968 and has stayed in Shanghai since 2003. He graduated from Huanyin Normal University and Tianjin Academy of Fine Arts. Wang is an experimental artist and his artworks involve various kinds of media, including the traditional ink and wash painting, calligraphy, the Western oil painting and also modern installations. Wang’s art features simplicity, plainness, poetry and profoundness. He keeps exploring the new conversations and possibilities between traditional and contemporary art. This time, the inverted installation “Mountain” occupies a lot of space, echoing the big ink-wash painting “Water” on the floor and creating a poetic artistic environment. With the long and curved lines as the structure of the mountain, the installations display the artist’s flexible artistic creation of “lines”. The folds on the mountain imply the flowing of water and such a connection between the mountain and water presents a contrast between the static and dynamic, lightness and heaviness, sparseness and density, simplicity and complexity. Wang creates such a visual order which involves the audience in this artistic environment of the mountain and water and encourages them to enter the fantastic land where they can see the mountain and water, the flowing clouds and even the swimming jellyfish.
Greatly influenced by the views of nature in Chinese philosophy, Wang chooses to present the mighty mountain and the immense water in his own way, instead of pursuing the traditional charm presented in the ink-wash painting, he abandons sensory substance in nature and deals with the Chinese mountain and water in a simple and pure way to show humanity and spirit. Using rice paper as his artistic medium, the artist transforms it into a three-dimension state, intervened with space along with conceptual art, which creates the mountain and water in a sculptural manner, with steel as the mountain structure and rice paper as its surface cover. It is a combination of industrial material and hand-made material and the two materials permeate and rust each other. The interdependence between the steel and rice paper implies the interrelationship between our traditional and modern culture.
The artist is good at exploring the variability and plasticity of things. The hard and soft materials, in his installation, permeate into themselves and create a production for each other. Such a new space structure forms an unique, private thinking space for the audience, in which they could travel on their mental journey. The sense of “familiar and strange” stimulates our imagination and reflection. The exhibition continues to March 12.
Photo and text edited by Zhang Wenzhi/CAFA ART INFO
Translated and edited by Sue/CAFA ART INFO
