This is the end... 2014-15
Part of Taipei Biennial 2014 at Taipei Fine Arts Museum, Taiwan
The Great Acceleration: Art in the Age of Anthropocene
From a distance, Yu-Chen Wang’s drawings as installations look eerily organic. A sign, perhaps, we are in the Anthropocene, and are about to confront some sizeable truths about humanity and its impact on the environment, across vast stretches of time. Drawings are encountered in frames, but many drawings also seem to have escaped from their frames and are wandering about the gallery, all over the place, on the floor, the walls, even the ceiling. They interact with technology, both inside the drawings themselves, as they mutate into and out of forms that seem technological, but also in the gallery space as the escaped forms converse with solid sculptural elements: metal, mesh and lighting. According to a leaflet, given out to audiences by costumed assistants, the wandering forms are “ungecnawen”. Suddenly, therefore, the present moment is a meeting and an interaction with the unknown: unknown to us, as humans, but the forms we encounter are (in fiction) collectively known to themselves, and therefore, fictionally, “conscious”. The experience verifies the opinion of Nicolas Bourriaud, curator of the Taipei Biennial 2014, that Yu-Chen Wang is really a “composer”, not so much in the musical sense but literally one who “puts together”, each element in one artwork functioning as a component part in a greater whole.
