Random records: breeze
Granduation Show 2022, Sandberg Instituut, Amsterdam, the Netherlands
photo by
Tom Janssen
For this series of works, Wei Yang pulls reference from a close
inspection of classical Chinese tales (Chuanqi 传奇 ) and their
influence on social reform after the Second Opium World War
(1856-1860), when Britain and France invaded China. One such book, Random records of a recluse in Wusong (Songyin
manlu 淞隐漫录 ) written by Wang Tao ( 王韬 , 1828-1897) and
accompanied by landscape illustrations by Wu Youru ( 吴 友 如 ,
1840-1893), tells of European women falling in love with Chinese men in adventurous storylines, with fantastic landscapes as
the background. Prior to the war, both male writers and characters
in classical literature could be sensitive, gentle and socially-engaged,
while under the post-imperial ‘Body Engineering' reform agenda,
they shifted to hyper masculine, tough and ruthless.
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Yang is a reader who is surely taken by Barthesian blisses of text, those writings that displace and are contingent on readerly drift: “I must seek out this reader (must ‘cruise’ him) without knowing where he is.”10 Tinctured by enchantment, their unfolding of words induces states of wonderment that unravel basic tenets of experience. Yang’s transversal correspondences and narratological sensitivities write sexuality in time, as time, without recourse to the tropes of sentimentality. In Random Records (2022), fragmented planes of suspended papier-mâché treat landscape as a language that is continuously reinscribed by the social. Informed by the slipstreams of Chinese post-imperial masculinities, the series references the fantastical sceneries of Wu Youru’s illustrations that accompanied Wang Tao’s late Qing dynasty fictions 淞隐漫錄 (Songyin manlu,1884–87). Shadowed by the aftermath of the Second Opium War, Tao’s travel writings were the first in Chinese literary history to portray Western modernity. Using classical narrative form, Tao articulated Sino-Western encounters through sexual, transnational, and metaphysical love affairs wherein a feminized, othered, domesticated West is ambivalently subjected to the supernaturality of China’s symbology. Through the dyad of Youru’s drawings and Tao’s writings, Yang retraces the ways in which a textual document (that apprehends a new historical reality) is sited along vectors of shifting representations.
by Alex Bennett
海底兰娜 120 × 150 cm 2022
厕纸，面粉，水泥腻子，金属网
Lana under the sea, toilet paper, flour, sugar, joint compound, metal mesh
媚黎小姐 120 × 150 cm 2022
厕纸，面粉，水泥腻子，金属网
Lady Mary,
toilet paper, flour, sugar, joint compound, metal mesh
photo by
Tom Janssen
媚黎 40 × 40 cm 2022
纸黏土，水彩
Mary: Seductive Paris, paper mache, watercolor
photo by Pauline Schey
Random records: breeze
Rundgang 2023, Städelschule, Frankfurt, Germany
八仙I
尺寸可变 2023
厕纸，面粉，水泥腻子，金属网
Eight Immortals I
toilet paper, flour, sugar, joint compound, metal mesh