WU Yiqiang 吴以强

WU Yiqiang (b. 1970, Yunnan, China) studied in Fine Art Department, Yunnan Art Institute in 1988 and later left school due to student movement in 1990.

 

Wu Yiqiang’s 20-year creation witnessed the ups and downs in the transformation of China’s history.  Selected exhibitions include “Advance”, Yunnan Art Insititute, 1994; “Individualism”, Yunnan Art Museum, 1996; “China New Force”, Shanghai Museum, 2007; The Third Contemporary International Visual Art Exhibition, Gwangju, Korea, 2010; “Transformation of History”- China Youth New Art Exhibition, Today Museum of Art, 2010; “Will of Showdown”, Siemens Art Space, Beijing, 2011; “Modern Way”, Contemporary Art Exhibition, National Museum of China, 2012. Up to now, he has participated nearly 200 domestic and international exhibitions.

 

Wu’s art creation features anti-school and anti-official art and involves various areas such as painting, performance and installation. Since 1998, he started to paint on newspaper, trying to reveal the absurd reality through changing the relationship between words and images and through implantation of images. The material difference and the richness of the text content become the visual elements in the eye of the artist. This then becomes the visual and reading series works of art of the artist, which is multi-dimensional work updated along with newspapers. The artist recent works are trying to recover the faces in paper media through piling the newspapers. What’s interesting is when many newspapers are piled up, the image is gradually lost and eventually deviates from reality. This might be the best metaphor or metonymy of the paradox and unreal world.