He believes that the “chaos” of the digital age can also become a kind of aesthetics. He lives in a pictorial world between the real and the virtual, who remains skeptical and constructive of his reality.

Wang Ziquan's art practice draws from his unique observation and understanding of the Internet and the virtual world, exploring the threshold between the virtual and the real. He adopts the narrative of computer screen recording to copy and paste the content in both virtual and physical spaces. Wang Ziquan considers the virtual world generated by computer technology as a world of absolute beauty; virtual technology overcomes the uncertainties of reality, parameters and grids allow people to realize the best effect in the virtual world which the physical world doesn’t offer.

Cultural space is an essential type of urban public space, and the object of Wang’s focus. According to Henri Lefebvre, the spatiality of daily life is inseparable from modernity and is the most critical perspective for understanding social production. Wang Ziquan's Fake Reality turns a real fish into a stuffed object with 3D scanning and hand-stitching, prints the digital leaves from a computer game, and then pastes them onto the real plants. This way, the viewer would smell the fish and leaves while looking at their images while their ontological beings are lost. Wang Ziquan’s attempt to blurring the boundary between the virtual and the real, is a metaphor for the conflict between the material and spiritual realms in urban space.

In the 21st century, the impact of digital technology on the development of cities and the lives of their residents has become transformative, especially with the virtual space on mobile phones overlapping with the physical space of the city. The artist adopts 3D scanning technology to transform his body into a flat surface by printing and displaying the entire process on a screen. Wang Ziquan questions the forms of the real world and the virtual identities while pointing out that the flourishing of digital technology is predicated on the dissolution of traditional culture.

Electronic screens in urban public spaces are inundated by CG animation, from smartphones and subway TVs to outdoor advertisements. The Internet has brought superficial diversity to urban life, but from the point of view of software production, it is a "homogenous diversity." In his work Aftereffect, Wang Ziquan abandons 4G animation as a form of on-screen artistic expression, choosing instead to retreat to one step before completion, presenting the viewer with a rough, unrendered model of the artwork. A viewer can see the apparent red, yellow, and green coordinates and the lighting trajectory he used in his modeling, which Wang Zizhun considers to be a real existence. Guided by a narrative and commentary, while the viewer learns about the software system and its visual language, and at the same time, the artist pulls the viewer back to the perfect world of 3D software, where one faces the realities of the virtual world and the absurdity of the real.

Wang Ziquan

Wang Ziquan, born in Shenyang, Liaoning in 1993, currently lives and works between Hangzhou and Shanghai. He graduated from the Central Academy of Fine Arts with a B.A. degree in sculpture in 2017 and from the Royal College of Art with an M.A. degree in 2019. Wang’s practice is rooted in his unique observation and understanding of the Internet and the virtual world, exploring the threshold values between virtuality and reality, and using 3D software to imitate the absurdity in the physical world. By using narrative computer images, he copies and pastes between virtual and real spaces.

Recent exhibitions including: “Art Nova 100”, Guardian Art Center, Beijing, China, 2019; “Fragmentation”, The Coningsby Gallery, London, United Kingdom, 2019; “Material Statement”, Dyson Gallery, Royal College of Art, London, United Kingdom, 2019 and etc.; Wang Ziquan was shortlisted for the Ashurst Emerging Artist Prize in 2020.