Wang Ya-hui (王雅慧) is drawn to the little things in life, and her art always exhibits a childlike attentiveness to the co-existence between the imagined and the experienced. Her daydreams appear in the form of a little fluffy cloud floating through an old house in Visitor (訪客, 2007), or as everyday objects sliding into walls and tables, disappearing and re-emerging somewhere else in Ex-change (2006).
More recently, or on Oct. 16 last year to be exact, a huge rainbow appeared over Taipei. Many of the city’s residents took photographs of it and posted them on their blogs. This collective fascination with a natural phenomenon piqued Wang’s interest and inspired part of her new solo exhibition, Rainbow & Bow, currently on display at the Galerie Grand Siecle.
For When I Look at the Rainbow, Wang collected pictures of the rainbow she found on the Internet and re-arranged them according to a structure whose logic is not immediately apparent to the viewer. Wang leaves a clue on top of each print to help audiences decipher her intentions or form their own conclusions.
“To me, the design is like a secret code. It has its own inner logic in relation to how the photographs are connected. Each photo represents one person’s perspective, and through my combinations [of the images], these photos, which were scattered across the Internet, make a certain connection that is not scientific or rational, but changeable and always in flux,” the 36-year-old artist said.
For Two Billion Light Years of Solitude, Wang shot footage at night of the residential complex where she lives once every one or two minutes for four consecutive hours. In the resulting video, bright, animated lines connect lights when they are switched on in the windows of the buildings. Unlike the more abstract patterns in the Rainbow series, the lines and dots of light recall the constellations, which are also a man-made concept that attempts to impose a sense of order upon the chaos of the universe.
The Archer, a one-channel video work, was the result of Wang’s recent and relatively new experience of living in apartment buildings.
For Wang, the tiny windows of the apartment buildings she sees from her balcony are like mysterious spaces that cannot be discerned or experienced. One day, the image of an archer suddenly appeared in her mind. In The Archer, the athlete stands on Wang’s balcony and aims at the windows in the distance.
“It’s strange to live in an apartment. Your orientation to the ground and other spaces is ambiguous,” Wang explained. “Your relationship with them is casual and contingent.”
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