IMG 6964-001-Identity

Cass Sculpture Foundation, Goodwood, West Sussex.

Standing at over six-metres tall, Identity by Wang Yuyang is a spectacular, monumental work commissioned for exhibition A Beautiful Disorder in 2016. Its colourful and convoluted folds of layered brass, metal, wood and stone appear at once natural and organic, as well as alien – like a fantastical apparition of what plant life might look like on a distant planet. Despite its otherworldly appearance, Identity, as its title suggests, is actually a product of distinctly human ingenuity, technology and culture. Using 3D rendering and modelling software, Wang has converted one of the most iconic and influential texts in modern history – Karl Marx’s Capital: Critique of Political Economy (1867) – into a binary code that entirely determined the material, colour and structure of the sculptural outcome. The work thus not only alludes to the collapsing boundaries between art and technology, but also raises pertinent questions concerning the power of ideology in today’s hyper-networked, globalized world. How do we ‘read’ a work of art? What socio-economic, cultural, political and inter-subjective processes are at stake in the act of artistic appreciation, and how are they converted into a system of values? How have these systems been determined, and what do they stand for?