"I am interested in bringing a conventional image of - perhaps - beauty into a state of liminality. I want the viewer to acknowledge the ambiguity or the disorientation that occurs when facing a portrait of a person who is in the middle stage of a rite of passage from being human to being something else.
Adding hair doesn't mean for me retrograding my subjects to the state of primates but it is like letting them reborn after a process of mutation. Therefore, every single hair that I draw on their smooth skin or on their smart clothes is for me like instilling a seed of death onto their bodies."
---- Wang Haiyang
Capsule Shanghai is pleased to announce our first participation to Artissima with "Skins", a solo project by Chinese artist Wang Haiyang (b. 1984 in Shandong, China).
Skins is conceived as an installation of pastel works paired with an animation and a faux-fur carpeted floor. The paintings, depicting hair-covered ancestral men and women, live in a surreal pictorial space that subverts the passage of time. Wang Haiyang masterfully plays on the viewers' natural instinct to feel both extraneous and yet connected to the narrative, bound to recognise part of the human experience reflected in the eyes of these biomorphic creatures.
This unlikely cast of characters is transplanted from the prehistoric era into the contemporary stage as actors of modern human mannerisms, while also ironically being a commentary of the absurdity of contemporary times.
