SHIWEN WANG (b. 1995) currently based in London. Prior to the Royal College of Art, she received her BFA at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC) (2019) and BA in Set Design at the Shanghai Institute of Visual Art (2017).
Recent Exhibitions Include: Final, Not Over- Again, Unit 1 Gallery/Workshop, London (2021), Issuing Gallery, The Intermission, Shenzhen, China (2020), Hongik Museum of Art, ASYAAF: Hidden Artists Festival, Seoul, Korea (2020).
My work concerns language, particularly the limits of its representation and the vagueness of verbal expression. I explore these linguistic liminal spaces by fleshing out the tension between hiding and revealing. I am not simply interested in engaging the viewer in a wild goose-chase for hidden meanings. I aspire to invite them to a semantic game of hide-and-seek, to be played merely for its own sake.
Ambiguity inhibits somewhere in between, echoes the state of being transmitted and encountered that I have been in.
From East to West, from the digital world to the material world. I clash with, merge with, sometimes reinforcing, sometimes diminishing, sometimes augmenting, sometimes fragmenting, and sometimes being destroyed by my surroundings.
I gather together an assortment of visual fragments-from language, ritual elements, nature, and digital culture-to create pictorial collages that speak to both the many excesses of contemporary life and our tireless attempts to process them.
Imagine you are staring into the corner of a room that lacks penetrating light.
A thin, impalpable, faltering light is swaying.
You know perfectly well it is a mere shadow, but the imagination and the pareidolia creeping in that shadow, producing an inexpressible aura of depth and mystery, of overtone but partly suggested. The lack of clarity of every single thing in the room is far from disturbing, but rather creates a moment of mystery, it might almost be called, a moment of trance.
In this room, the feeble candlelight illuminates in ripple-like waves, under this indirect light there always something about to emerge, something hiding.
Installation shot from Final, Not Over- Again, Unit 1 Gallery/Workshop, London (2021)
