Arts preview: Wang Yefeng's art is rooted in self-discovery
Artist Wang Yefeng believes that to produce interesting works, creative people must be obsessed with the question of who they are. "If I want to analyse something in my artwork, there's no better subject than myself," he says.
i-GENERATION
Art Projects Gallery
Artist Wang Yefeng believes that to produce interesting works, creative people must be obsessed with the question of who they are. "If I want to analyse something in my artwork, there's no better subject than myself," he says.
This is especially true when artists travel abroad. While many who move overseas attempt to understand and immerse themselves in a new culture, Wang says he prefers to spend the time getting to know himself better.
His quest for self-discovery is behind his two video installations, which, alongside some sculptures and prints, will be showcased in his upcoming exhibition at the Art Projects Gallery at PMQ in Central.
A Figure (2009) is composed of duplicated images of Wang's nude body posed and arranged with reference to Renaissance paintings, a subject he learned about on the mainland. Well-Disciplined Kids (2012) is a six-channel video piece featuring a group of expressionless babies in a chaotic backdrop filled with tanks, jet fighters, and female bodies in pornographic poses.
Wang and the bodies in each work look to be wearing deer antlers on their heads. But Wang explains that the headpiece is, in fact, a combination of a pig skull and a deer antler; this symbolises a dragon, and therefore Wang's Chinese inheritance.