Artwork: Fragmentary No.3
Artist: Wu Yuhang
Year: 2021
Media: Giclee print (herbs, color film)
Size: 90×105cm
Edition: 1/3
Price: RMB 15,000
Fragmentary stems from the artist Wu Yuhang’s experience with skin conditions, which his mother mitigated through herbal medicine.
Meanwhile, he and his family visited the mountains in his hometown where they collected herbs and boiled them into a medicated bath. Though such a prescription lacks professional guidance, the natural approach alleviated his pain. The process became a spiritual exercise for Wu. After his first encounter, he frequently revisited his hometown and tried to experience the fragile tension between chronic conditions and pain while walking in the mountains.
To create these images, the boiled herbs he collected during his mountain walks and then placed film he’d taken with his parents into the liquid to fumigate and soak. The emulsion coating of the colour negative film is soaked, peeled off, and even deteriorated due to the liquid medicine, leading to a series of incomplete images. His contact with such films brings him into a meditation in which those pervasive fragmented images are no longer a presentation of scars and traces. On the contrary, they are elves full of healing energy that enables Wu to connect detached images and bridge the gap between self, homeland and family.
About the Artist
Wu Yuhang
Wu Yuhang was born in Jiangjin, Chongqing in 1994 and obtained a Master’s degree majoring in New Media Art at Experimental Art College of Sichuan Fine Arts Institute. He graduated from the Sichuan Fine Arts institute in 2020. His works usually start from the photographic medium. On one hand, he manipulates and intervenes with the negative through the perceptual potential of the body, and extends the language of photography in its subtle chemical reactions and deterioration process. On the other hand, the imaginative images produced in the traumatic process are treated as a form of meditation to heal the soul, while he explores the spiritual power of art in its abstract fragmentation form.
He has participated in 2020 Photo L.A (Los Angeles, US, 2020), New Art From China (Islamabad Art Gallery, Pakistan), Flying Of New Media (Jitang Art Museum, South Korea, 2019), Chongqing Forest – A Sample of Asian Ethical Cities (Xinghui Contemporary Art Museum, Chongqing, 2018) TENSION (Winchester Gallery, UK, 2018), Save As… (3rd lab, Chongqing, 2017), Hello, My Appearance (UCCA, Beijing, 2016) and other exhibitions.
About the Gallery
Once Gallery (Beijing, Shanghai)
Once Gallery was founded in the summer of 2021, after presenting an eponymous exhibition in a three-storey old lane house in Shanghai. By the end of the year, the gallery opened its space in Beijing, where founder Sylvia Xue Bai began to collaborate with contemporary artists who employ unique artistic language and whose works resonate with the current times while leaving the spectator with lasting impacts. With its focus on the curatorial context of each presentation, Once Gallery adopts new approaches appealing to those interested in learning and collecting works about artists the gallery represents and stimulates their passion for art. Launched in Beijing/Shanghai, Once Gallery aims to grow steadily and dynamically in the post-pandemic contemporary art landscape.
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