Wang Haiyang (b. 1984, Shandong) combines the twinned forms of painting and animation to expand the rhetorical scope of these two media. Shortly after graduating from the printmaking department of the Central Academy of Fine Arts, he began to create psychologically charged animated sequences, playing on unlikely formal connections among disparate elements.

“New Directions: Wang Haiyang” premieres a meticulously produced stop-motion animation Wall Dust (2016) and five experimental films: The Proof of Existence, Communication, Golden Breath, Seize the Moment or the Moment Seizes Me, and The Invisible Hand. Wall Dust is the final installment of a trilogy, sustaining the distinct language and style pioneered in Double Fikret (2012) and continued in Freud, Fish and Butterfly (2009). Wall Dust presents the surreal world of the trilogy’s protagonist Fikret, replete with imagery that oscillates between the lonely, weird, absurd, and erotic. In the other new works, short loops presented on bulky monitors, he applies the fundamentals of stop-motion animation to video, exploring the visual representation of traces, time, consciousness, and serendipity. In these works, the creative process, like the finished film, reflects the artist’s desire to at once compress and elongate time.

New Directions

Initiated in 2015, the “New Directions” series offers some of China’s most promising artists a platform to realize their first institutional solo exhibition and monographic publication. Deepening UCCA’s ongoing commitment to emerging practices pioneered by shows including “ON | OFF” (2013), “Breaking Forecast” (2009), and the “Curated By…” project (2010-2012), this series of solo exhibitions aims to present, through a constellation of singular positions, an overall sense of the richness and complexity of new art in China today.

About the exhibition

Dates: 2016.11.4?-?2017.1.8

Venue: Ullens Center for Contemporary Art

Courtesy of the artist and Ullens Center for Contemporary Art, for further information please visit http://ucca.org.cn.