Since living in the United States for a decade,Frank Yefeng Wang’s experiences away from his home country of China have provided a profound reflection on his artistic production. His work has become increasingly concerned with finding meaning in life through borders, traveling overseas, and between fact and fiction. The concept of constant relocation, adventure and seeking the significance of home and truth is always a crucial component in the artist’s researches.
Frank Yefeng Wang’s projects incorporate media including 3D animation, 3D prints, digital prints, VR and sculpture, resulting in installations full of poetic and peculiar visual language. As a digital native, his current work grapples with obscure borders between the real physical world and artificial virtual spaces. His most recent works are an amalgamation of the various landscapes he encounters – drawing inspiration from contemporary iconographies, mythologies, and inspiring/enlightening proverbs and delirium found in old books. Rotation Method (2018) is exemplary of this. The animated short film depicts a surreal journey of a traveler in a gold plated racing helmet accompanied by a dog with a phonograph shaped-head. Referencing the rotation method theory by Kierkegaard, the film places a great emphasis on the emotional transformation of moving to and residing in the United States. Another work, [‘penthaus] (2017) quotes Liu Ling’s claim of the universe as his house and the house as his underpants in “Shishuo Xinyu”. In the animation, a virtual home, in the shape of a common pair of jeans, is traversed by a pig without backlimbs – a metaphor for the strong psychological experience of my ongoing sojourn in the west. Both of the recent works offer meditations on the artist’s experiences in the United States in comparison to his metaphorical “past life” in China.
