Read More | Wang YuYang | Issue 12

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ISSN 1755-0866 | Online

Issue 12 | Oct 2011

Artificial Moon Wang YuYang

Publisher:

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Text and images, 2011 © artist, writers and Horsecross Arts Ltd

Threshold artspace launched in September 2005 in Perth, UK. It is home to Scotland’s only permanent collection of contemporary media art with 60 works acquired over 2 years. The artspace covers a number of project spaces available for artists’ interventions including an entrance box for interactive soundscapes; a ‘canvas’ of 22 flat screens dominating the artspace for multi-channel video art installations; an interactive playground for art games and live internet art; a trail of sound boxes and sensors embedded in the floor and ceiling; an audio visual treat in the public toilets; copper-clad roof for light artists. All Threshold artspace locations are linked together by ‘intelligent’ software which allows artworks to be displayed through curated exhibitions and experienced 24 hours a day throughout the year.

Horsecross is an independent arts agency delivering cultural, conference and community activity in Perth Concert Hall and Perth Theatre. Located within the foyer of Perth Concert Hall Threshold artspace sits on the site of the original Horsecross, Perth’s 17th century horse market. The name is synonymous with bustling activity in the heart of the city. The development of the £19.5m Perth Concert Hall and Threshold artspace was a Millennium project and is part of the area’s economic development strategy to position Perth as one of Europe’s most vibrant small cities by 2010.

Horsecross aims to put this part of central Scotland firmly on the cultural map both nationally and internationally.

artspace

The essay Illusive Realities: Wang YuYang’s Space Odyssey by Katarzyna Kosmala was commissioned and published on the occasion of the re-mastering and acquiring of Wang YuYang’s works Artificial Moon (2008-10) and Moon Landing Programme (2010) for the Horsecross Arts permanent collection of contemporary art and their world premiere in November 2010 as part of Wormholes – the first solo exhibition in the UK by this emerging Beijing-based artist at Threshold artspace curated by Iliyana Nedkova.

Wormholes by Wang YuYang was produced by the artist, curator and Horsecross Arts for Threshold artspace in partnership with 55degrees, Glasgow. Supported by Scottish Arts Council Imagine Communities Fund. Katarzyna Kosmala is a curator and freelance art writer, Reader in Visual Culture, University of the West of Scotland, Visiting Research Fellow at GEXcel, Institute of Thematic Gender Studies, Linköping University and Örebro University, Sweden and Visiting Professor in Fundação Getulio Vargas Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. She lives and works in Edinburgh.

“In the dark and cold winter of 2010 we dared to dazzle and delight our local communities and visitors from far and wide with Artificial Moon - the centrepiece of Wang YuYang’s solo show Wormholes. We hosted YuYang’s first appearance in the UK during his short artist residency in Perth and facilitated his interaction with local young people who admired his different cultural sensibility. Our major achievement was the negotiation and acquisition of Artificial Moon – Wang’s signature artwork-cum-a gigantic bauble of lights suspended in midair – which is now proudly in our public collection. Wormholes ran from 28 November 2010 until 20 February 2011 while by popular demand Artificial Moon glowed on for much longer in the heart of the artspace and is there to be seen by generations to come. Katarzyna Kosmala’s essaynot only provides an in-depth analysis of all the works featured in the Wormholes exhibition but serves as the first comprehensive monograph on YuYang’s recent ouvre.” Iliyana Nedkova

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The loss of paradise is destined to be repeated over and over by human curiosity. Karsten Harries

Dreaming about other universes, suspended between a reality and an assumption in visualizing a journey of spatial explorations, we are sucked into a vacuum of infinite possibilities. Mystery and remoteness of space for our generation seem to have similar impact on howlongings for distant, ‘other’ places emerge or inspirations to transcend the familiar unfold, as the vast oceans had once signified for the Greeks in Homer’s Odyssey.

Imagine a place of no matter, a place of no volume... Like Stanley Kubrick in his epic drama of space exploration, Wang YuYang invites us to question various ideas associated with technological advancement, evolution, scientific progress and human possibilities in a reference to extraterrestrial discoveries. YuYang taps into these grand themes, it seems, with an attempt to convey what appears as illusive realities. In making his media installations and video works he constructs what could be described as conceptual ‘in-betweens’; works that enmesh a child-like playfulness with a cognitive drive for scientific accuracy.

Karsten Harries, a philosopher and a theorist of art and architecture in the essay on the ethical significance of environmental beauty discusses possible origins of human motivation in a quest for space exploration, as being informed by two contradictory desires. Making reference to Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, Harries positions these contradictory desires as the juxtaposing of the infinite and the intimate, the domestic vis a vis the cosmic. First, there is a desire for a beauty in a human quest, a desire for something that transforms a sense of ‘being lost in space’ into the familiar place, and second, there is a desire for the numinous, a drive to encounter the other, beyond the familiar, often in a response to a sense of being trapped in a too confining world, longing for a sublime mystermium tremendum et fascinas .

Unresolved questions about the limits of human existence and a juxtaposition of a sublimity of the universe against a smallness of the humanity have been the key conceptual anchors informing Wang YuYang’s artistic practice. Born in Harbin, in Heilongjiang province, most North-Easterly part of China, YuYang moved on to Bejing where he obtained a Master of Fine Arts Degree from Bejing’s Central Academy of Fine Arts where he currently teaches. As a new generation media artist, he is interested in explorations of the social and the political power of the media and the multi-function of the object in our contemporary life. He also utilises obsolete technology and the aesthetics of the waste material in his artistic practice. For instance, one of his sound installations is a comment on the consequences of progress by giving a voice to the now forgotten audiotape. In his hour long work Statement (2010), exhibited as part of Wormholes at the Threshold Welcome project room comprised of 16 sensors and 8 speakers, the story of making the audiotape unfolds. The visitor to the artspace is thus encouraged to imagine the recording equipment through a peculiar scraping-like sound of the played tape. We quickly forget the past and dream about the future.

Illusive Realities:Wang YuYang’s Space Odyssey

Katarzyna Kosmala

The progress in contemporary astronomy and physics have been fuelled as much by speculations about existence of other forms of intelligence as by political inspirations for leadership in space research in the second half of the 20th century. Stanley’s Kubrick’s film 2001: A Space Odyssey was released a year before the historical event of the first man landing on the moon. It was in the year 1959, one of the Soviet Union’s Luna missions became the first spacecraft to land on the moon’s surface, capturing the blurry images of its far ‘dark’ side. Yet, it was not for another ten years that the first man supposedly stood on the moon’s surface. Since then, the images of the moon and of space have infiltrated contemporary culture and continue to feed our dreams about the sublime.

Like many, Wang YuYang has been fascinated with the themes of the moon, (mis)conceptions about outer space and the politics of space explorations. Why did we travel to the moon? Why do we long for distant, unknown universes? In his multi-channel video installation Moon-Landing Program (2006-10), showing as part of Wormholes on the Threshold Wave of 22 screens, YuYang reconstructed in full colour the black and white footage of the first man landing on the moon thus re-appropriating the live television broadcast from 20th July 1969. On that day, two American astronauts of the Apollo 11 mission, Neil Armstrong and Edwin Aldrin became the first people to reach the moon, touching down the poetically named Sea of Tranquillity. Armstrong and Aldrin accomplished yet another attempt in the scientifically and technologically driven space race quest of the United States to conquer Soviet Union in the era of the Cold War politics. The space exploration race continues today and questions like ‘who does own the moon’ are left unanswered. Instead, all information we get is just a fraction, a version of another truth, a media blur.

In order to reconstruct the eventful moon landing, YuYang hired 2000 sq m at the Universal Studios premises in Beijing to built a prop set from scratch, similar to those used in Hollywood big budget, block buster cinematic productions. The artist wanted a life-size set that could have mimicked the opening scenes of Armstrong and Aldrin’s presence on the moon. However, it was not a team of technicians who executed the work. He, himself, constructed a spacecraft and the moon surface all by hand. He then hired actors dressed in his own hand-tailored white space suits to re-enact the moon landing mission. The production process lasted over a year .

YuYang’s version of the moon landing programme appears to display more colour and vision – offering somewhat more spectacular account in high resolution to aid our historical memory reconstructions. In the twenty two video channels installation at the Threshold Wave one could witness the 3.28 minutes long excerpt of the original, blurred, black and white footage alongside the artist’s production in colour. Initially, the installation was presented as a two channel projection, a space suit prop and the camera. The juxtaposed footage is an attempt at truth verification. Questions about media validity in constructing of history emerge. Can we judge the data by its reproduction? We go back to Plato’s warning: Those who tell the stories rule society. Which of the two moon landing programmes do you prefer? In the case of the glorified and magnified 22 channel video installation, you can choose the preferred channel for yourself, even without a need for remote control.

The moon has always fascinated human civilizations. Back in ancient Mesopotamia astronomers observed lunar eclipses. Galileo in 1609 used a self-made telescope and observed the craters on the lunar surface. YuYang’s constructed surface of the moon for the Moon Landing Programme was made out of burnt coal, crushed into small pieces and powdered into dust-like particles. The subject and indeed the object of the moon also features in one of YuYang’s most spectacular installations Artificial Moon (2007-10). The sphere of Artificial Moon – 4 m in diameter – has been created not from burnt coal this time but assembled, in a DIY style, out of variety of 10,000 blubs. Energy-saving bulbs, fluorescent strips and tubes were all connected with wires with the help of the local Beijing factory’s workers. The Moon this time is represented as a blinding reality.

Artificial Moon Wang YuYang

Artificial Moon Wang YuYang

It was only few years ago, traditional light bulbs were outlawed and withdrawn from the sales across the European Union states and in other places. Lunar presence in its energy-saving manner entered the heart of the Threshold artspace and the Perth Concert Hall’s big auditorium in November 2010 with a glow of cool bright, white light emanating from up high. Artificial Moon travelled all the way from Shanghai, where it was exhibited outdoors, imitating a giant Chinese lantern suspended on a tree in a public park in Xujiahui, replacing the actual moonlight, invisible at the night sky due to high level air pollution.

Alberto Perez Gomez and Louise Pelletier in Architectural Representation and the Perspective Hinge argue that now our world can be conceived as ‘a world of artefacts that are no longer a bridge between our consciousness and the external realities’ , instead the artefacts seem to construct a wall, or a trap impossible for us all to escape, surrounding us with illusiveness of reality based on our own control and self-referentiality. YuYang’s Artificial Moon certainly challenges such a world view representation, searching for new ways to approximate the human and the sublime.

The installation dazzled with the emitted lunar-like light. The visitors of the darkened artspace turned temporarily blind, gazing at the sphere suspended from the dome of the oval shaped building housing the Threshold artspace. With Wang YuYang one could enter in-betweens of the natural and the artificial. Moon glowed in the midst of the light and colour feast; a poetic comment on the changing role of the environment and critical reflection concerning prospects for technological advancement. The hollow structure of the moon held the lights at the surface; a moon surface made of light. The installation literally filled the space with its presence, both in terms of size and the light projection. The moon shadow kept haunting the viewers in the flashbacks, persisting like the smile of the Cheshire cat’s in Alice in Wonderland whose body had gradually vanished, starting with the tail, and, ending with the grin: ‘Well, I have often seen the cat without a grin; but a grin without a cat! It is the most curious thing I ever saw in my life!’ One might wonder: ‘I have seen the skies without the moon, but the moon without the sky?’

Is Wang YuYang’s moon just a surface? A plastic object brought within proximity of touch-distance? Or it is an entity of pure semblance? Edward Sanderson commenting on Wang’s Artificial Moon showcased in Beijing in 2009 during his solo show, pointed out that the emanated light blocked the possibility of analysis, instead the arrangements of the bulbs reminiscent of the moon surface, invited the viewer to generate own shapes and images, modulations of the light invited multiple truth-forms to emerge .

Maybe we ended up in a non-place? The exhibition title for Wang YuYang’s solo shows in Beijing, China and in Perth, Scotland draws on a term, which defines two connecting black holes, forming tunnels through space and time, Wormholes. Wormhole tunnels or bridges between areas of space fascinated great physicists and scientists including Karl Schwarzschild and Albert Einstein. Such tunnels or bridges open a possibility of moving from one point in space to another without ever crossing the space between, possibly conveyed as a time wrap.

Non-places have been defined by Marc Auge in Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity (1995) as places of transience that do not hold enough significance to be regarded as places, such as a motorway, a supermarket, or an airport. YuYang’s non-places reside in the outer space. A black hole is not literally a hole in space but a dense mass. Portrayed in Doctor Who as time vortex or in Star Trek series as a passage to the distant Gamma Quadrant, the visible whirlpool-effect associated with black holes is merely the accretion disk of visible matter being drawn toward it. We can immerse in thinking about the limits of human existence against YuYang’s simulations of the socio-politics associated with space exploration.

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Artificial Moon Wang YuYang

The artist invites the viewer not only to the moon but also to test the general theory of relativity and to question time travel. Slavoj Zizek in his guide on re-reading Lacan argues that the big counterpoint to quantum physics, being Einstein’s theory of relativity seem to offer unexpected parallels to Lacan conceptualisation of the Real. He states: ‘The starting point of the theory of relativity is the strange fact that, for every observer, no matter in what direction and how fast he moves, light moves at the same speed; in an analogous way, for Lacan, no matter if the desiring subject approaches or runs from his object of desire, this object seems to remain at the same distance from him...furthermore, the general theory of relativity solves the antinomy between the relativity of every moment with regard to observer and the absolute velocity of light, which moves at a constant speed, independently of the point of observation, with the notion of curved space. In a homologous way, the Freudian solution to the antinomy between the subject’s approaching or running away from his objects of desire and the ‘constant speed’ (a distance from him) of the object-cause of desire resides in the curved space of desire...the shortest way to realise a desire is to by-pass its object-goal, to circulate around it, to postpone its encounter’ (pp. 76-77) . Reaching the unreal of the Real? Whether as a flee to fight escape or conquer universe-inspired exploration of unrealized realities – desires, YuYang seems to be asking: What are the possibilities of being sucked into a black hole and then ejected from a white hole in another part of the universe?

As the universe becomes visible in the centre of the wormhole’s shadow once the horizon is crossed, the light falls into the black hole interior region from the other universe. It seems that the universe remains unreachable, as the bridge always collapses, always before the observer has time to cross it. Not unlike Plato ‘we still wonder: ‘How can you prove whether at this moment we are sleeping, and all our thoughts are a dream; or whether we are awake, and talking to one another in the waking state?’ Theaetetus (360 BC)

Ambiguous imagery approaches a surrealist realm in the short artist’s video Dust is Dust (2007/2008) also an integral part of the Wormholes exhibition, showing at the wall-mounted screen on Threshold Stage. The viewer’s perception of scale is altered. As dark matter is a matter of unknown composition, a matter that cannot be observed directly, similarly here, scale has been conceived as something malleable and indefinable. The filmshows star-like, monochromatic representation of microscopic particles of dust, collected from YuYang’s studio and photographed with a magnifying lens. YuYang plays with the ideas behind frantic shifts of energy and momentum occurring perpetually in the universe framed by the microscope-lens distance, constructing an elusive magnification of dust beyond recognition. Dust becomes here a meteorite rain, or indeed, a star dust. The title itself denotes a particular finality; a comment on an empty region of space, a cosmic cul de sac, and at the same time, an apotheosis of nothingness. We are existentially routed in a funeral prayer text: ‘Earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust’.

It seems Wang YuYang deliberately strives for ambiguity; possibly in order to stir the viewer’s unconscious. Like quantum foam, wormholes might appear and disappear, as dark matter candidates ‘float’ in the multi-connected space, possibly forming these invisible bridges between two different universes, between the Real and the unreal. Can these ‘holes’ be used as extra-dimensional windows for being in-between worlds like Lyra Belacqua and Will Parry in Phillip Pullman’s trilogy of novels His Dark Materials (1995-2000), two coming of age children wandering through a series of parallel universes?

Artificial Moon Wang YuYang

Wormholes is thus an exhibition installation. By combining new works with older works, the ‘realms’ of history and nature, science and space is deconstructed. If we draw on Merleau-Ponty’s ‘the flesh of the world’, conceptualised in The Visible and the Invisible (1968) as an element of being , once again one can reflect on culture and nature composites and on (in)finitude: ‘The flesh is not matter, in the sense of corpuscles of being...not mind, not substance. To designate it, we should need the old term ‘element’, in the sense it was used to speak of water, air, earth and fire, that is, in the sense of a general thinking, midway between the spatio-temporal individual and the idea, a sort of incarnate principle that brings a style of be-ing wherever there is a fragment of being. The flesh is in this sense an ‘element’ of Being’ (p. 139).

Being in non-places...In a pursuit of multiple truths, Wang YuYang investigates and mocks the place of science and of technology in the human progress. In his installation Electricity (2007), exhibited as part of Wormholes at Threshold Flush ‘project rooms’, assembled out of a silver battery and a wooden chair, the artist attempts to capture the energy of his ....consciousness. Claiming he is using the technology of medical science, in order to transform activity of his own brain’s transmissions into the electric power of a battery, leaves you no doubt. One needs to ask: What is being constructed here, electric consciousness, captured by the new media or counterfeit ambience of suspicion?

A pseudo-scientific accuracy of YuYang’s artistic practice, interwoven with a strategy of deception, materializes in what can be summarized as the aesthetics reminiscent of a technological flare of the installation-objects. The artist is employing humorous tactics to interrogate the relationship between the body and the mind, the relationship that is sealed in an experi-ential learning process. ‘The invisible exists, while the visible may not be real’ says YUYang and continues to construct and reconstruct his versions of mythologies, merging the fictional with the scientific, always in a utopian attempt to reach what is in-between the unreal and the Real.

1 Karsten Harries ‘The Ethics Significance of Environmental Beauty’ in Gregory Caicco (Ed) Architecture, Ethics,

2 Karsten Harries Ibid. p. 137.

3 Katarzyna Kosmala in the interview with the artist. September 2011.

4 Alberto Perez Gomez and Louise Pelletier in Architectural Representation and the Perspective Hinge. Cambridge: MIT Press. 1997. p. 384.

5 Edward Sanderson, Wang Yuyang: Have We Walked on the Moon Yet?, Boers-Li Gallery: Bejing. 2009.

6 Slavoj Zizek ‘Troubles with the Real: Lacan as a Viewer of Alien’, How to Read Lacan, Granta Books: London. 2006. pp. 76-77

7 M. Merleau-Ponty The Visible and the Invisible. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1968.

ISSN 1755-0866 | Online

Artificial Moon Wang YuYang Artificial Moon Wang YuYang