Art Projects Gallery presents a New York based Chinese artist Wang Yefeng’s inaugural gallery solo exhibition, titled “iGeneration”. Prior to this, Yefeng’s cutting edge works have mainly been exhibited only in museums and other prestigious academic venues. These include the Co-prosperity Sphere Culture Center in Chicago, El Museo Cultural de Santa Fe, Xuzhou Museum of Art China, The Museum of Luxun Academy of Art (Shenyang, China) and 99 Art Space at Shanghai University.

An innovative artist using the digital media and currently leading the Digital Media Program at Rhode Island College as an Assistant Professor, Wang Yefeng’s works feature virtual worlds and imaginary characters created by the artist to raise issues about the real world that are close to his heart. The “iGeneration” solo exhibition showcases two of his important video installation works, “Well-Disciplined Kids” and “A Figure”.

“Well-disciplined Kids” is a 6-channels video art (also available in limited edition Archival Pigment Print mounted in Diasec) made in MAYA virtual modeling and animation program. The series feature dehumanized “made in China” children, devoid of facial expressions, personalities and emotions. As a way to reinforce his own identity and seeing himself to be one of the children, the artist digitally mapped his own face and applied it as a facial texture onto the child characters. The juxtaposition of the children characters innocently playing with surreal animal-headed female figures, a broken tv set, jet fighter and military tank set against a backdrop of desolate, barren terrain, reflects the artist’s view of the dilemma facing modern Chinese people’s “psychological world in an absurd environment”.

In his video art piece (also available in limited edition Archival Pigment Print mounted in Diasec) titled “A Figure”, Yefeng took photos of himself in various postures, wearing an animal head that comprises of a pig skull and deer antlers (a combination that constitutes the symbol of a dragon in Chinese culture based on ancient Chinese mythology). The body postures and gestures in the composition took references from Renaissance paintings, as a memory of how the artist was systematically trained in western classical styles at art schools in China.

Digitally making multiple duplicates of his own image, each image becomes his digital avatar carrying the same emotions and thoughts. Composed in a chaotic-looking arrangement, all the figures moving in extreme slow-motion, the artist fabricates a neurotic field in which the viewers can be engaged to participate in this contemplation.

-Art Projects Gallery

Image: © Wang Yefeng
Courtesy of the artist and Art Projects Gallery