"Endless Somnia" constructs a triple space that gradually guides the audience from reality to the realm of dreams. Within this enigmatic trance, flickering, noisy, overlapping, and floating images are compressed into a vast chaos that seems to represent the zero-degree moment of time, yet slowly unfolds in sequence.
In "Eyecandy", Wang Wenkai humorously captures the "eyesore" of consumer culture in society. The bright-colored images, resembling sweet but cloying "Eyecandy", create a dizzying effect from the exhibition entrance, reproducing absurd realities in a clever visual language.
"Somnia" represents the boundary between reality and dreams. Wang creates his work through an altered state of consciousness that mirrors shamanic ecstasy mindset, mimicking a feeling of apocalyptic, fatigued afternoon nap, where he felt a peculiar sense of impending doom. Viewing nature as an organism, he believes that imagination serves as a tool for awareness, rather than an illusion-making mechanism. This includes entering a "Platonic" cave, cracking open eggshells, exploring a "safe house" for self-discovery, dancing in the air amid thundering skies and bursting fireworks, and more. Through poetic graphic narration, the exhibition leads the audience on a journey through time and space, presenting a logic of return, overlap, and linear expansion.
Although photography is commonly considered a faithful restoration of memory, Wang repeatedly splits and recombines graphics in various ways, relying on self-destructive impulses to maintain the fluidity of memories. The album presents a much longer journey of consciousness. In the "Day for Night" series, which flickers in dim light, Wang creates realities or illusions through lighting, mirroring the moments of lucid dreaming.
Roland Barthes believed that photography represents a ghostly presence of "death". At its inception, due to slow shutter speeds, photographs were often blurred and used as evidence for supernatural phenomena by spiritualists. People even believed that taking a photo could capture the image of a ghost. In "The White House", based on the Salem Witch Trials of 1692, Wang constructs a new story framework, restoring a witchy stage space with cinematic sets and lighting. Actors explore this given space freely, following the script. The projection of images and waving drapery within the stage space create a sense of drifting thoughts. The interior space invites the audience to interactively paint, contributing to a work of art with different states of consciousness, similar to how surrealist painters collaborated on the same work in the past.
Text/Xiao Ruiyun
Note:
1-2 Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography
3 “Cadavre exquis” is a painting done by collaborative drawing methods, used by surrealist artists such as André Breton to create bizarre and intuitive drawings.