Fabien Fryns Fine Art is pleased to announce the first solo exhibition on the West Coast by multimedia artist Wu Junyong. The exhibition features his new eight-and-a-half-minute long computer-generated animation Cloud’s Nightmare, which is accompanied by three sets of oil-on-canvas, three brass objects and four painting installations depicting the characters and sequences in the animation.
Born in 1978 in Fujian province, Wu attended the prestigious China Academy of Fine Arts in Hangzhou, where he earned his BA in printmaking and MFA in new media arts. Since his childhood, Wu has made the world’s idiocies the focus of his creativity. Inheriting a strong sense of mockery and rebellion from historical figures in art history, such as Pieter Brueghel the Elder and Dürer, Wu uses his art and his dark humor as the instrument to express his acute criticism and protest. Beginning in 2003, Wu has used Adobe Flash to create ridiculed and whimsical animations reminiscent of shadow puppetry, an ancient form of motion picture storytelling using opaque cutout figures in front of an illuminated backdrop to create the illusion of moving images, which bring to life folklores and fantasies. The theatrical protagonists in Wu’s animations for the past 6 years have been men who wear tall cone-hats. These silhouette figures make a grand entry to a generic public space (often a public square with a monument in the center) at the beginning of each episode. They first freeze in a long pose and then adjust their cone-hats. These heightened dramatic moments of introduction once again reassemble the tradition of Chinese opera and shadow puppetry. Besides the traditional repertoire of stories, Wu’s concept for his motion pictures was also inspired by the irony in Chinese idioms. The disconnection between the metaphorical references of idioms and their visualized graphics intrigues Wu. The tall cone-hats in all Wu’s animations, for instance, were a result from the idiom “to put on a tall hat.” To put a tall hat on someone is to excessively extol someone, who is often with power and authority. China is rich in idioms, but there is not one single idiom dictionary. Wu has spent a few years actively collecting idioms and then illustrating them into iconography. In his Flash videos, he reverses this process by inserting iconography in his loosely orchestrated narratives to imply the embedded metaphors. This unique discourse presents a challenge: to extract the symbolism from the iconography depends largely upon one’s cultural and linguistic knowledge in Chinese. However, regardless of how much his implication can be elicited, one does not fail to understand Wu’s acute cynicism towards authority and its oppression of individuality. “The so-called individuality within the context of China refers to publicly dissenting. With public spaces diminishing and being muzzled, voices can only be heard in the margins of society. To me, in such a ludicrous and suppressed totalitarian society, fables are the best way for one to protest, to protect and to voice his opinion,” Wu says. Cloud’s Nightmare is Wu’s 7th animation in the sequel that articulates the absurdity existing between reality and illusion, between darkness and illumination and between humor and ridicule. The original Chinese title of this animation is A Breakout of Birds and Beasts, a Chinese idiom referring to the state of chaos and abandonment when a regime is defeated.
Wu Junyong’s work has been exhibited or collected internationally by institutes and museums, such as the National Museum of Contemporary Art (Seoul), Museum of Cinema (Turin), the third Guangzhou Triennial, Streaming Festival 3rd Edition (the Hague), the third China New Media Art Festival (Hangzhou) the White Rabbit Museum (Sydney), and Museum of Contemporary Art (Shanghai).
Cloud’s Nightmare, the debut solo exhibition by Wu Junyong in Los Angeles, will be on view at Fabien Fryns Fine Art from December 12, 2010 through February 12, 2011. A reception for the artist will be held on Saturday December 11, from 6 to 8 p.m.
