Tabula Rasa Gallery is pleased to present the solo exhibition of Wang Ziyue The Sixth Day from 31 August to 20 September 2019. This is her second solo exhibition at Tabula Rasa since the exhibition Relax, the Force Has Got Your Back (2015). This exhibition is the Beijing stop of the Question Theater Project, and it is a comprehensive project combining theater workshop with live performance, video, installation, and sound art. During Wang Ziyue's stay in the gallery, she uses 'theatre' as a form of social practice to stimulate the artistic sensibility of ordinary people and pin downs the problems and dilemmas they encounter in the city they live, constructing a space where people can communicate and let their imagination run free. We will present the outcome of the one-month theater workshop conducted by amateur actors in the gallery on the opening day, 31 August.
The title of the exhibition The Sixth Day was created during the rehearsals of the theater workshop. Our plan was adjusted due to force majeure, thus the Sixth Day refers to the day that will never come. The space-time continuum that existed in the collective imagination resonates with the dreamy realm the theater attempts to create. In the exhibition hall, Wang Ziyue employs PVC pipes, wide-angle lenses, plastic fabric, searchlights, and other everyday objects and combines them together. Through open casting call for amateur actors, Wang recruited six ordinary people of different ages and professions and invited them to the exhibition space to relax, play games, express their views and build relationships. Using the stories of ordinary people as samples that embody the lives of contemporaries and transferring their conversations to the stage, Wang attempts to demonstrate the fragmentation of contemporary life and extract surprising findings from the contingency. As the artist concludes, 'Imagined Utopia is somewhere non-existent but quite quintessential to us.' After the opening day, the rehearsal footage will be showcased in the exhibition.
The exhibition will also include Novel or Poem, a video and installation work created when Wang Ziyue participated in an artist-in-residency program in Kyoto, Japan in 2018. The work is the first piece of the Question Theater Project. Wang created five different scenes based on the question 'Do you want your life to be a novel or a poem?', which stems from the artist's feelings about Kyoto. Inspired by the organic spatial structure of traditional Japanese architecture and its idea of 'space in flow', the work will be projected on five screens. In addition, two other works–Exhale Inhale and Mirror–that the artist created for this exhibition will also be featured in this exhibition.
Press release courtesy Tabula Rasa Gallery.
706 North 3rd Street, 798 Art District
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Beijing
China
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