Image courtesy of Smack Mellon. Photo by Etienne Frossard.
12/2/2023 - 1/28/2024
The House of the Solitary - Solo Exhibition, Smack Mellon, Curated by Rachel Vera Steinberg (NY)
The House of the Solitary extends from a series of video animations created by Frank WANG Yefeng in the summer of 2020 and reimagined as an uncanny domestic installation for this exhibition, combining poems, 3D rendering, texts sculpted in VR, and distorted soundtracks of airline on-hold music. Sparked by the artist’s unexpected and prolonged lockdown experience in Berlin, the exhibition quietly remarks on the mental paradigm shifts caused by the global isolation of the 2020 pandemic.
Installed on suspended monitors, the animations depict non-human everyday objects, such as a Kinder egg, a stovetop espresso pot, and a pack of cigarettes. Each transforms into a character that repeatedly inflates and deflates via computer dynamic simulations, physically fluctuating between states of mundane and strange. Accompanying the objects are poems written by the artist then sculpted into 3D-rendered text that borrows the visual information of the respective object. In the background, the music elongates time into a taunting and perpetual loop.
Carriers of the heightened sense of empathy and ambivalence distinct to the moment they were created, the characters are markers of the interstitial existence of this extended pause, which fundamentally altered perceptions of a forthcoming future. The environment captures the mundane ways that lived-reality seemed to pull apart from itself, splitting known categories into fragments of in-betweenness. Although rooted in a moment in the recent past, the exhibition encapsulates the subtle exhaustion and absurdity that bears heavily on how the status quo continues to operate.
Image of panel discussion (clockwise, from top left): Frank WANG Yefeng, Natasha Chuk, Qianfan Gu, Barbara Pollack
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