https://www.wangyefeng.com/moscowhasniceweather2020

"Moscow Has Nice Weather" is displayed as a dual-channel video installation. The piece comprises phone footage of in-flight screens, poems about the uncertainty of intercontinental traveling, and 3D rendered images. The repetitive audio-visuality of its animation suspends viewers in contemplation and emphasizes the process of travel as an essential spatio-temporal experience of becoming. Several lines of poetry manifest the unknown future’s mixture of anxiety and freedom: “I wish I could drive across the Pacific Ocean / Do your best to enjoy the journey / To the abyss of unknown.”

Moscow Has Nice Weather (2019)

https://www.wangyefeng.com/the-house-of-the-solitary

This sculpture is a tangible representation of The House of the Solitary. Its shape is extracted from the selected animation chapter, entitled The Cell Phone. The sculpture, first outputted through high-resolution 3D printing then cast in cement, exists in the physical world as a vehicle of retention. Transformed into imperishable materials from moving images, it bears the weight of my affect during the pandemic lock-down in both conceptual and physical forms. Complex emotions are embodied in the concrete form of The Cell Phone. When displayed, viewers are encouraged to pick up the sculpture and sense its weight with their own hands, to mobilize emotions transmitted between the original creator and the viewers. Simultaneously, unique QR codes are engraved on the sculpture's back, allowing viewers to scan and connect to poems related to the artifact.

The House of the Solitary - The Cell Phone (2020)

https://www.wangyefeng.com/the-house-of-the-solitary-text

The digital photographs feature selected phrases from the poems of “The House of the Solitary.” They are created in VR sculpting software and rendered as suspended objects in front of the HDRI pictures capturing my Berlin accommodation during the quarantine. The texts calligraphed/sculpted in the virtual reality environment resonate with the stories of the coherent objects in the animations and show the malleability of the inbetween space as they are both 2D and 3D, graphical and sculptural.  

The House of the Solitary - The Phrases (2020)

https://www.wangyefeng.com/birdsv2-sosad

BIRDS Volume II is a collection of 3D animation shorts that provokes contemplation on nomadism and the characters of "inbetweenness." The animations splice stories derive from an international trip in Europe. In the stories, the characters appear as invisible ghosts who levitate around us. They witness their surroundings while constantly being neglected - a metaphor for the ambivalent life of the Other in societies.

BIRDS Volume II - SO SAD is inspired by a graffitied bird spotted in Dresden. In its story, a conversation unravels between the bird on the wall and a tourist. The animation juxtaposes graffiti as a symbol of free expression and a law that marks graffitis as vandalism to revisit the notion of freedom. 

BIRDS Volume II - SO SAD (2020)

https://www.wangyefeng.com/the-whimsical-characters

Characters that exist “inbetween” are integral to my creations. The Whimsical Characters is an ongoing project. It relates to the affect lingering in the space of inbetweenness, and attends to the philosophies of posthumanism. In this body of works, a series of digital bodies reside in plasma screens as discarnate entities, indicating that they are beings of the virtual world. But they continuously attempt to affect and connect to the viewers through their emotional outbursts built upon dramatic motion-capture data. The coded recording of real human movements is enveloped in the polygonal virtual “bodies.” Their paradoxical forms lead to an imagination of subjectivities preserved in a complex array of ambiguous dimensions.

The Whimsical Characters (2020)

https://www.wangyefeng.com/the-house-of-the-solitary

The House of the Solitary combines poems, 3D rendering, texts sculpted in VR, and distorted soundtracks of airline on-hold music. It is derived from a lock-down experience in Berlin due to the pandemic in 2020. The prolonged stay and multiple flight cancelations put one in a peculiar liminal situation, as the initial brief stop-over evolved into an absurdity of time and space. During the lock-down, I've spent most of the time indoors instead of going out to explore the unfamiliar city. As time goes, the temporary accommodation became customary while the surroundings remained utterly foreign. This created a strong feeling of displacement and solitude. During the process, I developed intimacy with the objects stranded together with me, which eventually led to the creation of the work. 

In the animations, the objects are converted to “characters” who are repeatedly inflated and deflated. They carry the riddles of our current time and provokes thoughts on an alternative future.

The House of the Solitary (2020)

https://www.wangyefeng.com/secret-webpage-yellow-peril

"The Levitating Perils" is a provocative work exploring the transformation of the Chinese diasporic subjectivities amid uncertainties and challenges. It responds to the returning surge in hate against Asian communities and delves into the genealogy of “Yellow Perilism,” which roots within a long tradition of Eurocentric representation of Asia as a threat to the “West.” Amongst all the racial incarnations in history, a vicious octopus with Fu-Manchu’s head is an icon that consistently appears via images, documents, and texts. Such antagonized otherness in Western narratives helped manifest the “imagined Western” identification and conjured the fears to colonialist dysfunctions.

As a racial signifier in the dualist Western fantasy, “yellow” has been an imputed phenotype that varies concerning different periods of European colonization into “the Orient.” It has come to represent an “East Asian” classification in its most recent use. As an entirely fictitious character created in the West, the yellow octopus embodies a looming dread to endanger the established “Western norms.”

In this project, a being with an octopus body and dragon heads levitates uncannily. It looks rather indifferent and whimsical than dangerous. The project subverts the stereotypes of “Asia.” Its sculpture and animation provoke the public to face and contemplate a fixed logic. As a century-long fear still lives ubiquitously in subtler ways nowadays, the Yellow Perilist anxieties are exposed and interrogated. “Yellow to whom and Peril to whom?” The scrutinies of such questions are carried out through the appropriation and deconstruction of a historically rigid racial symbol.

The Levitating Perils (2021)

https://www.wangyefeng.com/birdsv2-slowspectre

Slow Spectre is constituted by a 3D animation and outdoor billboards in various locations in London, UK. The piece is inspired by a discursive road trip in a remote area in Europe. Away from the primary highroads and large chain gas stations, an absurd bird-shaped mannequin is accidentally encountered at a humble café on a country roadside. The mannequin endlessly waves at the passing vehicles without receiving a response. In the animation, the character appears as an invisible ghost who levitates on the road. It witnesses its surroundings while constantly being neglected. Its sedate sense of time is in contrast to the constant acceleration of the passengers under its eyes. By recontextualizing the character in its solitude, the piece disrupts and slows down people’s rapid life with an uncanny presence. QR codes are printed together with the digitally rendered images on the outdoor billboards, making the passersby stop, scan, and view the animation in the online exhibition. While the accelerationist prediction of emancipation has failed to been realized, this character intends to fulfill an outlook of a “newness” by the gestures of “deceleration” and “disruption.” 

This project is commissioned by Contemporary Art Programme at Royal College of Art in partnership with Gasworks.

Add

Frank WANG Yefeng