New Directions: Wang Haiyang

From 4 November 2016 to 8 January 2017, the Ullens Center for Contemporary Art (UCCA) presents “New Directions: Wang Haiyang,” premiering a meticulously produced stop-motion animation Wall Dust (2016) and five experimental films: The Proof of Existence, Communication, Golden Breath, Seize the Moment or the Moment Seizes Me, and The Invisible Hand.

Wall Dust is the final installment of a trilogy, sustaining the distinct language and style pioneered in Double Fikret (2012) and continued in Freud, Fish and Butterfly (2009). Wall Dust presents the surreal world of the trilogy’s protagonist Fikret, replete with imagery that oscillates between the lonely, weird, absurd, and erotic. In the other new works, short loops presented on bulky monitors, he applies the fundamentals of stop-motion animation to video, exploring the visual representation of traces, time, consciousness, and serendipity. In these works, the creative process, like the finished film, reflects the artist’s desire to at once compress and elongate time.

A graduate of the printmaking department of the Central Academy of Fine Arts, Wang Haiyang combines the twinned forms of painting and animation to expand the rhetorical scope of these two media.

In Wall Dust, Wang continues in his signature style rooted in sketching with chalk on sandpaper, constructing a dazzling world reminiscent of the filmic language of Sergei Parajanov in its poetic leaps of imagination. Here, the imagery and symbolism of each frame is multivalent, making a series of connections through free association, while embodying the sequential “traces” of before and after, representation and erasure.

In 2016, Wang Haiyang created five experimental video works continuously broadcast over surveillance monitors in an attempt to open new channels for contemplation.

The basic formal logic of these works and their filmic language remains based in stop-motion animation.

The continuous presentation of “traces” of creative production and destructive erasure eventually yield to greater concerns of temporality and existence. In Seize the Moment or the Moment Seizes Me, Wang focuses on the tension between stasis and continuity, using the sandpaper to record instantaneous moments of time, which are then erased.The buildup of each “moment” is captured, allowing traces of both time and its erasure to coexist on the same plane.

Wang also combines his own life experience with that of his filmic experiments as in The Proof of Existence, for which he uses calcium tablets to smear the sandpaper white then charcoal to cover the new surface with dark circles.

For Wang, calcium tablets play an indispensable role in his life and metaphorically portray an inescapable force. The traces left by the black charcoal and white calcium tablets are mutually transformative, evoking a kind of struggle that reflects the artist’s own trajectory.

Similarly, episodes of aesthetic chance occurring within an arbitrary set of parameters, the semantic ambiguity created by the absence of an active subject, and the circumscribed limits of communication appear as central concerns within Golden Breath, The Invisible Hand, and Communication.

Stop-motion animation is not simply Wang Haiyang’s medium of choice but also forms the basis of his interrogation of the moving image. Within each work, he attempts to construct and dissolve the stability between static fictional images and real elements, both of which eventually appear in movement on screen.

Wang Haiyang (b. 1984, Shandong) graduated from the printmaking department of the Central Academy of Fine Arts and currently lives and works in Beijing. A short time after graduating, Wang began to produce psychologically-charged stop-motion animations, using widely varying elements to create impossible forms and relationships. Wang has won numerous international and domestic awards, including the Jury Award at 3rd Art • Sanya (2014), Silver Dove at the 55th DOK Leipzig Film Festival for Double Fikret (2012), the Focus on Talents Award (Today Art Museum and Martell Art Fund, 2012), and Grand Prix for Freud, Fish and Butterfly at the 25th Holland Animation Film Festival (2010). His recent solo exhibitions include “Dynamic Field: Wang Haiyang” (Minsheng Art Museum, Shanghai, 2016), “Rhizomes” (Galerie Paris-Beijing, Paris, 2013), and “The Metamorphosis” (White Space, Beijing, 2012). Recent group exhibitions featuring his work include “Turning Point: Contemporary Art in China Since 2000” (Minsheng Art Museum, Shanghai, 2016), “Air—The 2nd Ningbo International Contemporary Art Exhibition” (Ningbo Museum of Art, Zhejiang, 2016), “Collection of Contemporary Art” (Lille Métropole Museum of Modern, Contemporary and Outsider Art, 2014).