APSMUSEUM and L+MALL are delighted to announce that "The Whimsical Characters," a new media Video Artwork by artist Frank WANG Yefeng, courtesy of the Vanguard Gallery, is presented on the ground floor entrance screen at the junction of South Pudong Road and Shangcheng Road, L+MALL, Shanghai on 19 July 2023.
Characters that exist "inbetween" are integral to Frank's creation. In his ongoing project "The Whimsical Characters," a series of digital bodies resode in plasma screens as discamate entities, indicating that they are beings of the virtual world. But they continuously attempt to affect and connect to the viewers through their emotional outbursts built upon dramatic motion-capture data. The coded recording of real human movements is enveloped in the polygonal virtual "bodies." Their paradoxical forms lead to an imagination of subjectivities preserved in a complex array of ambiguous dimensions.
This work was exhibited in ZAZ10 Times Square, New York.
╱ Frank WANG Yefeng ╱
Frank WANG Yefeng is a transdisciplinary artust, researcher, and digital nomad inbetween New York City and Shanghai. Yefeng earned his MFA in Art and Technology Studies from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2011.
Exhibitions：
TheBRIC Biennial, the OCAT Biennial, the Bangkok Art Biennale, CCS Bard Hessel Museum of Art (NY, USA), Gasworks London (LDN, UK), Pylon Lab (DRS, DE), Hyundai Motorstudio Beijing (BJ, CN), Shanghai K11 Museum (SH,CN), etc.
Solo Exhibitions, Residencies, Fellowships：
K11 Art Foundation (WH, CN),Smack Mellon (NY, USA), International Studio & Curatorial Program (NY, USA), New York Art Residency & Studios Foundation (NY, USA), Pratt Institute (NY, USA), Asia Art Archive in America (NY, USA), MacDowell (NH, USA), and Vermont Studio Center (VT, USA), among others.
Avatopology is a transdisciplinary project that presents a digitally driven, open-ended, and non-hierarchical collaboration by bypassing the exploitation of digital marketing tools and social media networks. It displays and archives the process of collaborating with digital diasporas found on internet marketplaces, who were commissioned to create digital portraits of myself. These digital creators are based in Indonesia, India, Mexico, Nigeria, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka, among other Global South locations.
Slow Spectre is constituted by a 3D animation and outdoor billboards in various locations in London, UK.The piece is inspired by a discursive road trip in a remote area in Europe. Away from the primary highroads and large chain gas stations, an absurd bird-shaped mannequin is accidentally encountered at a humble café on a country roadside. The mannequin endlessly waves at the passing vehicles without receiving a response. In the animation, the character appears as an invisible ghost who levitates on the road. It witnesses its surroundings while constantly being neglected. Its sedate sense of time is in contrast to the constant acceleration of the passengers under its eyes. By recontextualizing the character in its solitude, the piece disrupts and slows down people’s rapid life with an uncanny presence. QR codes are printed together with the digitally rendered images on the outdoor billboards, making the passersby stop, scan, and view the animation in the online exhibition. While the accelerationist prediction of emancipation has failed to been realized, this character intends to fulfill an outlook of a “newness” by the gestures of “deceleration” and “disruption.”
The House of the Solitary combines poems, 3D rendering, texts sculpted in VR, and distorted soundtracks of airline on-hold music. It is derived from a lock-down experience in Berlin due to the pandemic in 2020. The prolonged stay and multiple flight cancelations put one in a peculiar liminal situation, as the initial brief stop-over evolved into an absurdity of time and space. During the lock-down, I've spent most of the time indoors instead of going out to explore the unfamiliar city. As time goes, the temporary accommodation became customary while the surroundings remained utterly foreign. This created a strong feeling of displacement and solitude. During the process, I developed intimacy with the objects stranded together with me, which eventually led to the creation of the work.
In the animations, the objects are converted to “characters” who are repeatedly inflated and deflated. They carry the riddles of our current time and provokes thoughts on an alternative future.
Dreamspace is a VR project developed based on my Experimental 3D animations The Drifting Stages. Dreamspace is a fictional and unfinished virtual apartment. It is constructed by common building material and random digital files in my 3D project folders. When the viewer enters the work, the virtual space repetitively recites a line of texts using Google Translator, it attempts to sell this virtual apartment to the viewer endlessly.