On the desk lies a cellphone that is dialing. The pre-set program transfers the call to the waiting list; a prompting soundtrack is transmitted through the speaker, rendering a cozy mood for an endless waiting in vain. Suddenly, being inflated with an irresistible sense of urgency, the phone’s surface stretches like an aluminized polyester film and hovers over the desktop while restrained by its cable. At a critical moment of bursting, the “cellphone balloon” deflates and falls on to the desktop, wriggling with phosphorescent glimmers. The pre-set program is indifferent to what just occurred, and the beep sound keeps ongoing. On the adjacent screen, viewers can see a metal balloon constituted by five letters of a short “bleep” in a consistent rotation while looking up at the ceiling with luminescence.

This is one of the animation sets from Frank WANG Yefeng’s digital moving-image series The House of the Solitary – The Quarantine Poems. A total of seven sets of animations will be exhibited in his solo exhibition On Hold at Vanguard Gallery from January 16 through March 6, 2021. This is the inaugural solo exhibition of Frank WANG Yefeng at Vanguard.

During last year, Frank WANG Yefeng has experienced delaying, detention, tarrying, and repetitive negotiations in a world of constraint. The limited personal space has become the primary scene of life and work, where the everyday objects are unprecedentedly paid attention to and observed: they become intimate however monotonous companions to him in a cramped environment and keep stimulating the cognition until one feels mentally fatigued. Semantic satiation starts to emerge at some point, making the objects uncanny and dismantling their original functionalities and purposes. Their forms are now once again perceived as never before.

In The House of the Solitary – The Quarantine Poems, the items with semantic satiation are a cellphone, a chocolate egg, a coffee pot, a pack of cigarettes, a clothes rack, a bus that follows strict schedules, and a nose with recurrent symptoms of discomfort. With digital images, Frank WANG Yefeng reproduces these items in a simulated reality. In the ceaseless cycles of inflation and deflation, they become the carriers of pent-up subjective emotions that require nothing but self-consolation.

The exhibition On Hold reveals Frank WANG Yefeng’s coherent and rich genealogy of his artistic creations. In other words, he takes upon images as the media to create time-based sculptures. The images are not made simply for narrative. The introduction of the temporal aspect in the three-dimensional sculptures in virtual scenes generates a diachronic poeticality. In the dual-channel videos, the poems suspended in the air intertwine with the ever-morphing items, and the latter are existential remarks extracted from the context of time. In the exhibition, these phrases and sculptures extend beyond the moving-images. The printed graphics of The House of the Solitary – The Phrases present texts fabricated in VR sculpting software, while The House of the Solitary – The Objects capture the critical moments of inflation and deflation of the items in the videos and are outputted as tangible sculptures through 3D printing and casting.

Vernissage: January 16th, 15:00-19:00, 2021

Venue: Room 204, Bldg 4A, 50 Moganshan Rd, Shanghai, China

Tel: +86 21 52522551