In One Thousand and One Attempts to Be an Ocean, Yuyan Wang creates a visual ocean brimming with deep emotions and a feeling of uncanniness. Wang’s vibrant and colorful video juxtaposes the monotony and superficiality of current internet iconography with the unexpected thrill of rediscovering the (un)known. It reflects on the experience of not being able to see the world with depth perception. Overall, these images may be seen as a mirror of the society of spectacle, as well as an ecological and social critique of the inexorable entropy of our information societies— groundless waves we are all together drowning in. What one hears is the question.
Yuyan Wang (b. 1989, China) is a filmmaker and multidisciplinary artist living in Paris. Wang’s work oscillates between film and installation, often taking an immersive perspective. Poetic and political, her approach aims to radiograph modern productivism’s mutations since the beginning of the twenty-first century. Her practice of image recycling is a form of detournement regarding the economy of attention.