Long Museum (West Bund) will host the exhibition, “Zhan Wang: Forms in Flux”. This will be the largest solo exhibition of Zhan Wang’s artistic career to date as well as the artist’s first solo exhibition in Shanghai. Other than presenting the artist’s most representative works over the last twenty years, a number of newly completed works will also be on view. For the exhibition, the Long Museum (West Bund) has transformed its galleries into cavernous spaces tailored to best showcase Zhan Wang’s “site in flux” and “cycles of forms”. This exhibition invites the internationally renowned curator and the director of the Mori Art Museum in Tokyo, Mr. Fumio Nanjo as its curator.
The curator states, “Zhan Wang’s solo exhibition presented at the Long Museum will chronicle the artist’s prolific artistic experiments from the earlier period to the present. In addition, this structurally compact exhibition emphasizes Zhan Wang’s notional transformations through works of art. What does sculpture-making imply, what is its conception, notion and methodology for composition – these are the questions that the artist inquiries and will thus be revealed in this exhibition. Zhan Wang’s artworks appropriate elements from Chinese traditional cultural elements, innovative craftsmanship and techniques, as well as addressing the various issues evolving around dialogues between contemporary life and space. These provide us with the important clues in thinking about contemporary art. The shifts in one’s artistic conceptions do not refer to one’s arbitrary ideas or a set of uncertainties, but follows a logical evolution of ideas. In this process, Zhan Wang has maintained a consistency that is uniquely his, which ultimately serve as an analogy for the cycle of life.”
Looking into “Forms in Flux”, starting with “Mao Suits” series in the 1990s, “New Art Quick Training Workshop” and the acclaimed “Artificial Rocks”, Zhan Wang simulated the forms in his surrounding environment; in fact, his sculptures are also shaped by simulating the force of nature from craftsmanship. After 2000, he was drawn to the reflection of the human figure and began to research the infinite effects and transformations caused by various changes in conditions including light and movement.. This led to the making of works such as the “morph” and “Metamorph” series. The notions of fluidity and infinity often recur and are interpreted in his works; a critical turning point took place in 2011 with the solo exhibition “My Personal Universe”, in which Zhan Wang employed dynamite in the course of production allowing the artist to successfully recreate the original moment of the big bang, that the world subsequently came into being. This work was developed from the “stone generator” produced in the previous year, that adopts mechanical modes of representation of the natural world. The new works that will be unveiled at the Long Museum (West Bund) has been brewing in Zhan Wang’s imaginations of forms over the years, its conception is developed from the two-dimensional mirror image to the three-dimensional in “morph” and “Metamorph”, and by appropriating his collaboration with the scientists and the methods of Computational Fluid Dynamics and 3D output, gave its final presentation. Unlike engaging in physical experiments in the past, the artist has projected a form into a virtual environment, allowing it to integrate, transform, auto-generate and co-exists between the virtual and reality. It is a conversion of energy and material, a world in which concrete forms and transformations are equally possible. As the artist’s hands-on component diminishes, creativity opens up to infinite possibilities.
