Enter by Wang Du

plastic sculpture
260 x 170 cm

It's a particular experience to wander among this huge installation of oversized figures of blue-haired women in very short skirts. All strike identical, somewhat unnatural poses, looking like they were performing some kind of modern can can. Their long legs all end in heavy black shoes, which - surprisingly - seem to be the visually most impressive part of the work.

It takes small wonder that the sculptures are modelled at images from a Japanese Internet porn-site. Once meant to give the onlooker power over the viewed object, now the object seems to exercise power over the viewer. This act of a re-orientation of an original gaze-intention may be a good illustration of the way Wang Du works. Based on his conviction that the media threaten to take over the definition of "reality", Wang is a masterly manipulator of images himself. He uses illustrations from printed and electronic media from all over the world as inspiration for his installations. Wang does not regard his work as sculpture, but prefers to talk of it as three-dimensional images. He is also not interested in dealing with specific discourses. The overarching theme of his work rather is the global situation of a thorough medialization and informalization where practically every society in the world has to deal with the political and social impact of mass-media. This also means that he does not work within the framework of some kind of "Chinese" tradition although he draws a certain amount of material from Chinese sources.

Through his skilful re-manipulation of media processed facts he pulls them back onto a different level of reality. In the process of creating his work Wang does not use sketches. Instead he produces small-scale three-dimensional models in the same material as the final work, which he then blows up to their final large scale. It is particularly the enormous size of his installations that make for their effect. The point of view of the spectator changes drastically. He or she does no longer watch a small image that can be handled at will, like carrying around. Instead one gets down sized in front of it and probably will have to walk into the image to fully comprehend. The act of looking at a two-dimensional graphic representation turns into an encounter with the massive presence of a more than life-size physical object. While the big size of the work is a metaphor of media power the artist's acts of first de- and then re-contextualization of the visual material reminds one of the manipulations that the media conduct on the informational content that they transport.