5 September 2009 by sinopop
Artforum.cn Reviews “Kàn Bù Wán”
Wang Yifan’s latest exhibition is titled “Kan Bu Wan” [which in English means you can’t finish seeing or looking], and is in utter agreement with the works themselves. Primarily video and installation works in this exhibition confront viewers with simply too much to take in, each individual work offering an extreme amount of information, making it possible that not a single viewer could finish “looking” at any single work in the show.Throughout his work Wang Yifan pays close attention to the dimensionality of time, then he confronts it with a challenge, Stakeout on Time––Wang Yifan’s Clock is one of his representative works. In this video, Wang Yifan takes a common quartz clock found in most Chinese households as his prop and then uses digital means to record its state over a period of twenty-four hours. Through this lengthy documentation, Wang Yifan covers the clock’s logo with an obscure symbol for his own name, and in an attempt to establish a new order he establishes control over time.In a general survey of Wang Yifan’s works, it appears he is examining trivial, humdrum things insignificant to mention. But beyond doubt there are minute changes that exist within these works. No matter if he is recording the state of a given space, or employing the thickly congested words of his own novellas written over canvas, magnified by Wang Yifan’s lens imperceptibly minute details are abruptly thrust into the spotlight. As such frivolous commonalities take starring roles in the works, the role of seer and the seen are begin to fluctuate. Through a stealthy hand, time itself is transformed into a character into whose life we peer, and the power of discourse is diverted into the hand of the viewer. Whether or not to look, or whether or not to finish looking are both determined by viewers. At the same time, the established duality and oppositional roles of the artist and audience are subject to change. Wang Yifan’s works provide a link by which the artist and viewer are linked, and by which both can envisage and deconstruct time.Author: Jing XiaomengTranslation: Lee AmbrozyOriginally Published in Chinese on www.artforum.com.cn
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