Footage from South China’s plastic plant factories, an exploration of the conventional boundaries between nature and its imitation.
Yuyan Wang imagines a world where oil, or an oil-like substance, is the glue that holds everything together, an allegory that messes with global notions of capitalism and extraction and questions the future — of this world and ours.
Green Grey Black Brown is philosophical science fiction that exposes the dark underbelly of the plastics and tech industry. In it, a dark slime with remnants of the Jurassic era resurfaces in today’s shopping malls. The work exposes the bloody logic of petro-capitalism and the global extractive industry, which is the flip side of the tech industry’s vision of a bright future.
The installation draws viewers into a hypnotic experience of a synthetic and dystopian landscape of flowing oil and plastic. Wang works with found imagery from industrial and commercial contexts. She explores how these moving images change depending on the contexts and ways they are used and disseminated. Through rhythmic editing and a gloomy looped soundtrack – a slowed-down version of Yes’s classic 1980s “Owner of a Lonely Heart” – the meaning of the images is transformed into a powerful sensory experience.
Yuyan Wang, born in China and currently based in Paris, is a filmmaker and video artist. Her works involve recycled materials from the industrial sphere of image production, tracing their mutation and proliferation within digital frameworks and representations. Through the editing process, Wang deconstructs and recontextualizes the intricate hierarchies and inherent meanings in materials – whether found, processed, or produced – striping symbols of their conventional paths of perception and turning them into immersive sensory experiences.
Her work has been showcased at Tate Modern, Palais de Tokyo, UCCA Beijing, the 12th Berlin Biennale, the 15th Gwangju Biennale, e-flux Video&Film, and various festivals, such as the Berlinale International Film Festival, the International Film Festival Rotterdam, MoMa Doc Fortnight, CPH:DOX, the European Media Art Festival, receiving numerous awards.