Dream

2016 - 2024

“The very fabric that constitutes us is also the stuff of dreams; our fleeting lives are flanked by the embrace of sleep.”— William Shakespeare, The Tempest, Act IV, Scene 1 Within the translucent confines of a sealed glass chamber, Wang Yuyang’s monumental installation, entitled Dream, unfolds as an autonomous mechanical arm inscribes images onto the transparent walls. These visual narratives are not the replications of human craft but are instead the precise delineations by the machine, following the rudimentary geometric forms—circles, squares, and lines—extracted from engineering schematics. Steering this spectacle is the artist’s own dreamscape, once modulated by the data harvested from an electroencephalogram cap worn by the artist during his slumber, which steered the creative act when the work was on display in the United States. Thus, as the audience in the U.S. gallery engaged with the piece, the artist was immersed in sleep within his native city, Peking, a temporal inversion that crafted an enchanting interplay between space and time. However, during the exhibition Chaos Mosis at Shenzhen Art Museum the previous year, the artist was unable to recreate this spatiotemporal dynamic, opting instead for a computer to deeply learn from an entire year’s archive of his recorded dreams. Wang Yuyang, in this instance, embodies Shakespeare’s concept, becoming the medium of dreams, subject to the choreography of technology. On the exhibition floor, the mechanical arm incessantly receives real-time dream signals, ceaselessly creating, while Wang Yuyang, in his repose, is swept along by a technological force beyond his dominion, culminating in an unpredictable display method: the canvases display lines reminiscent of human abstract brushstrokes, seemingly hand-drawn yet meticulously crafted by the machine from the lines of engineering blueprints. Deeper into this spatial realm, one encounters two panes of glass artfully removed, transitioning into a novel state. Viewing dreams as a methodology, this installation serves as an expansive projector, with dreams being nothing more than a montage expression of the day’s remnants.

Dream
2016 - 2024
Glass, Robot and Automatic platform car
H 289 x L 616 x W 438 cm
Dimensions: 230cm(l) × 170cm(w)

Dream01
Type: Painting
Materials: Acrylic, glass
Dimensions: H 210x L 120cm

Dream02
Type: Painting
Materials: Acrylic, glass
Dimensions: H 210x L 120cm