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WANG YOUSHEN 王友身
b. 1964, works and lives in Beijing
WANG YOUSHEN 王友身
1993 ~ 2012
installation
Giclee Print on paper, Wallpaper glue, Wallpaper knife, Ladder, Wood chair, Red plastic bucket, Cartons
Edition of 1 + 1AP
WYS_6844

Wang Youshen's artistic creations between 1991 and 1993 were a series of installations and performance art experiments carried out mainly in the medium of the newspaper. Upon graduating from the China Central Academy of Fine Art Folk Art Department in 1988. Wang went to work at the Beijing Youth Newspaper serving as the Editor of the Art Section. The work experience got the artist thinking about how the newspaper - one of the most important disseminative mediums of the time - floods the everyday lives of people, limiting their free choices and judgments. At a time when the internet was not yet widespread, people faced with the ubiquitous newspaper and the information it contained often had no choice but to passively accept it. In this light. the newspaper was a hot medium in every sense of the word. For this reason, in the Newspaper series, the artist attempted to use a series of replaced scenes and contexts to turn the newspaper, once a hot medium of high clarity and dense information, into a cold medium of low clarity and murky information. Through this transformation the artist was not only informing viewers of the hidden political power and commercial operations at work behind this ubiquitous medium but also trying to turn the newspaper's passive disseminator function into a more proactive artistic strategy.

Newspaper-Interior Decoration is an installation work created in 1993, one which shines together with another work by the same artist that year. Newspaper-Advertisement. In these two artworks. the artist used a sarcastic tone to respond to mainland China's rst real estate boom in the early 1990s. The waves of economic transformation were riding swells of information to flood the everyday lives of people. Whether it is indoors, in private spaces, or in such public spaces as the Great Wall, everything is covered in a smothering laver of information. If that is the case. then the artist might as well turn the newspaper, this medium of information, into the material that forms every space, using the most direct and frank way of placing people into this prison of information.

Detail pictures:

Related Exhibitions:
Wang Youshen - Codes of Culture, Beijing Inside-Out Art Museum, Beijing 03.26, 2022 -08.07, 2022
Afterimage: Dangdai Yishu, Lisson Gallery, London, U.K. 07.02, 2019 -09.07, 2019
The Seventh Shenzhen Sculpture Biennale, OCT Contemporary Art Terminal, Shenzhen 05.12, 2012 -08.31, 2012
45th International Art Exhibition Venice Biennale - Cardinal Points of the Arts, Venice, Italy Jun,1993 -Nov,1993


Related Texts:
Newspapers · Interior Decoration | 1993-2019 TEXT 2019



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