RAO WEIYI

A Thousand Plateau Art Space is pleased to launch Rao Weiyi’s solo exhibition We wander, in separate worlds. As a young artist of a new generation, Rao Weiyi transforms the unique texture of online images into experimental painting language. He does not rely on descriptions of such popular concepts as ‘Post Network’ or ‘Metaverse’, but highlights the fragmented visual logic with the lack of clarity, collage, and absurdity that is unique to network images. At the same time, he restores the electronic texture of the image by painting, copies the visual characteristics of pixels with strokes and pigments, and brings different combinations of colours, textures, and composition, thus turning painting into a creative visual ‘replica’. This reminds viewers of the basic aesthetic logic of Pop Art, but relies more on a traditional and personalised ‘painterliness’ derived from classic modernism.

In addition to online images, Rao Weiyi also cites different types of ancient illustrations. The far-reaching information originally contained in these illustrations, after being transformed into image form, has also become as whirling and mysterious as the flood of images itself. Rao Weiyi paints these illustrations and juxtaposes them in other images. Their truth is then buried by painting, and at the same time, excavated by painting. In this process, individual’s judgment not only becomes free, but also abandons all fulcrums.

If the industrial age has brought about the aesthetics of metals, what do people see in the graphical world and what new discoveries do they make about ‘beauty’? Surrounded by the Internet and technology, people may think of all kinds of dazzling electronic colours and optical effects at first, but behind these ‘high-definition’ and consumerism aesthetics, there also conceals the opposite ‘low fidelity’ vision, and ‘truth’ has almost become a kind of privacy in this situation.

Rao Weiyi’s works are closer to a typical post-modernism: they do not provide the answer to what is ‘beauty’, while deconstructing the existing answer and questioning the reliability of the trend. Perhaps his painting is only explaining that absurdity itself is a phenomenon worthy of attention. He practices this kind of gazing with painting, and ‘gazing’ is one of the ways to stay out of it and maintain independence. This exhibition invites the audience to join this gaze, which reminds everyone that they can rediscover their unique position in a confusing era. The title of the exhibition is ‘We wander, in separate worlds’. Maybe the part that people can communicate is always outside the language, so we can only wander ‘in separate worlds’, then this exhibition is like an intersection of everyone’s own wandering.