Wan Chaoqian: AS YOU LIKE IT

Wan Chaoqian

Curator: Chao Jiaxing

10 March - 29 May, 2022

Rm 105, Bldg 6, 50 Moganshan Rd, Shanghai

BROWNIE Project is pleased to present “As You Like It”, Wan Chaoqian’s solo exhibition from March 10. The exhibition features Wan’s work created in the UK and Beijing. It is also the artist’s debut solo exhibition in China.

The tranquil landscape has always been an undercurrent in human history. With the rise of the British middle class in the 19th century, landscape art depicting vast meadows became the testification of the middle class's awareness of social stratification." The Landscape is a vision shared and savoured by a group of people who like to wander through it." The Landscape is the history where the communist revolution and the silenced massacre as seen through the lens of a documentary (Patricio Guzmán, El botón de Nácar). The Landscape is obscure witchcraft and ecstasy (Lars von Trier, Antichrist). The Landscape is also the residence of the celibate loners in the anti-utopian world where they wander freely with the risk to be shot at any time (Yorgos Lanthimos, The Lobster)… They say there is a vast dense Arden forest around the Avon River in Stratford, which Shakespeare learned its ancient legends from his elders since he was a child, including the well-known story of the European heroic outlaw Robin Hood. And it is in this forest Shakespeare's script As You Like It (1599) took place.

Deeply influenced by visual experience and image history, the 1995-born artist Wan Chaoqian engages these profound landscapes in his practice: Disturbing stills from CCTV camera for military use, children running on the beach within reach of laser sights, the artist's home on Google Maps, torn portrait of a government official and an apple being peeled, an egg being buried bit by bit, a religious statue in an aromatic garden, a real-estate advertisement, a Le Corbusier styled contemporary luxury residence… These Landscapes are disposed under a series of interfaces that the artist called "perspective barriers", like the sniper's sights, the white circle in GPS, the Trompe-l'œil, even the visual composition in Taobao advertisements. Everyday information viewed through these interfaces creates a sense of alienation while the punctum emerges relentlessly. The linguistic history of Landscape (geographic) as image reminds us that its modern presentation has long overpowered its originally recognizable interface, while our artist is forming a new landscape using these mostly recycled images from modern life. Erwin Panofsky defined the existed psychological mechanisms of the image in human history, and today, images, as a classic "tertiary retention," have encountered a compression of our time by artificial intelligence. The images, virtual or actual, involved in Wan's works are testifying the creepy disciplines of the society of surveillance coined by Michel Foucault. They also serve as embodiments of the performance society（“Leistungsgesellschaft” mentioned by Byung-Chul Han) endorsed by the neoliberal economy, in the shape of those voluntarily purchased, ergonomically blessed backrest chairs with precise support.

Inspired by the Spanish psychotechnic prison cells during the Franco era, the exhibition space features a prison scene alluded by the dark corridor, nightclub booths and leather sofas, and post-party remains to formulate a territory of chaos, disturbance and insecurity. Within this territory, human consciousness tries to resist the increase of entropy during its ongoing image collection, production, and filtering. Right after the Winter Olympics season, we naturally recall how the genius skater Tonya once made such vulgar rants against the fourth wall, aka the camera (I, Tonya, 2017). In the meantime, Wan is painting the same level of anger to accuse his limited appropriation of narratives as image.

Text by Chao Jiaxing

 Selected Works