A tight close-up of a viscous material. Oil seeping from a drill head. Rocks made of papier-mâché, so tactile that one can almost imagine scratching their surface — sensing their texture. An impression of softness, perhaps of dampness. An elusive gleam of light. Amateur footage of a swarm of bees buzzing. Wind overwhelming the microphone of a smartphone. Yuyan Wang’s films engage our senses and draw us into a state of sensory contemplation. Their haptic quality distances us from narrative. From the outset, the images resist any meaning that might extend beyond what we see — and yet they remain disarmingly accessible, rooted in an extremely familiar visual register. We watch without understanding, effortlessly, without thinking. Forms and textures hypnotize us. We are intrigued, absorbed, carried along until the next sequence — and we find ourselves content with this mechanism, this temporality, this submission to the images, to their coherent or incoherent flow, to an editing process that appears random, evoking the way we consume images on social media, trapping us in an endless loop. A form of artificial reality, generated by an algorithm, in which we become willing hostages.

In her work, Wang brings together two worlds we tend to imagine as separate. On the one hand, extractivist processes, the many symptoms of the climate crisis, the production of light by contemporary societies, workers subjected to tedious and repetitive tasks — the traces of the Capitalocene. On the other, through seemingly random and complex forms of montage, she introduces what has become an essential part of our everyday lives: technology, mobile phones, artificial light, robotics, screens, internet culture. There is something strangely immersive about her work, as though sensory apprehension and the very logic of the edit prevented us from reasoning — as though each fragment, appropriated from videos that reflect the industrial production chain of images, were sufficient unto itself. The soundscape, often familiar, shifts between science-fiction-like scores, low-quality recordings, iconic pop songs and mechanical buzzing. Abrupt though they may be, the transitions unfold with a paradoxical fluidity, without ever feeling surprising. And yet, gradually, the concerns underpinning the work begin to emerge: a practice rooted in contemplation, duration and absorption — in a mode of viewing that slowly becomes a sensory experience. Out of the anecdotal emerges an intuitive, critical and poetic interrogation of our relationship to the world.

Images are the material of her work, but also its architecture. The mechanisms of the attention economy — capturing our gaze, delivering immediate gratification, providing constant stimulation — lie at the heart of the artist’s hypnotic montages. Yet this is less a commentary on the power of multinational technology companies than an inquiry into the transformation of reality itself: into an increasingly complex relationship between technology and a world that can still be touched. A relationship the artist explores above all through the senses. A situated, sensory experience that seems to be the only tangible reality that truly remains. Within a media landscape in which reality increasingly resembles a simulation.

Claus Gunti