WangShui’s practice is driven by a desire to dematerialise identity. With the same fluidity, they work across video, installation, and painting to inhabit shifting states of materiality and consciousness. Deepening their investigation of liminality, WangShui presents a newly commissioned installation comprising three large-scale aluminium paintings and an LED video sculpture. Exploring the migration of matter and form between Latin America, Asia, and Europe, the installation builds on the artist’s interest in the transnational interpolation of form. Each work integrates haptic and mechanical processes to blur the line between mind and machine. For this new suite of paintings, WangShui manually anodised aluminium panels with cochineal – a globally traded Mexican red pigment made by grinding up parasitic insects. The multichannel video sculpture is assembled with interwoven LED mesh screens, another transmutation of image and light. The video sculpture’s pulsing lights both attract and disorient its viewers – the artist’s reminder that consciousness is formed in the latent spaces between nodes of legibility.
This is the first time the work of WangShui is presented at Biennale Arte.
—Wong Binghao
