Project ShanghART WB Central, Shanghai
Opening: Apr. 30, 2025
Duration: Apr. 30, 2025 – Jun. 1, 2025 (Tue. to Sun., 11 am - 7 pm)
Location: ShanghART WB Central, Building 4, No. 288 Ruining Road, Xuhui District, Shanghai, China
Artist: Yiyao Tang
ShanghART WB Central is pleased to present "Faulting, Glimpsing," a solo project by Yiyao Tang, from April 30 to June 1, 2025. On the gallery’s mezzanine, the artist has constructed a conceptual installation in the form of a winding corridor-like structure. The pathway through the corridor is constrained or disturbed by concealed slits in the walls, offering viewers only tentative, oblique glimpses—fragmentary and obscured—of the internal landscape: an ordered grid of coconut coir bricks imprinted with front pages from Permanent Five' newspapers. The audience is drawn into a chaotic amalgam of truth and appearance, wherein the circulation of information is compressed, interrupted, obscured, and recursively looped, indicating a multidimensional field of power structures.
"Faulting, Glimpsing" iterates further on concepts from Tang's 2024 work "Faulting," collapsing material transmutation and geopolitical narratives into a single substrate. The artist systematically arranges coconut coir bricks imported from various countries within the enclosing corridor-like structure. Composed of processed coconut husk powder, these bricks dissolve upon contact with water, serving as a soil medium for cultivation. Within the artist's conceptual framework, the coconut coir bricks are both an organic medium that facilitates the cycle of ecological life and a metaphoric connotation to the ground that upholds institutions, states and nations. The transformation of the material state thereby reflects the inherent instability and fluidity of internal systems. The surfaces bear front pages from mainstream publications of the five United Nations permanent member countries, from four specific days in 2025. News Images are either preserved or excised; as water infiltrates, boundaries liquefy, order dissolves, and embedded seeds germinate, creating fluctuations of legibility between presence and absence. These material phases reveal potential instability beneath appearance, placing viewers within a double fault line of information and materiality.
The project unfolds on the cantilevered platform of ShanghART WB Central Space, adjacent to the historic Shanghai Nanpu Railway Station, built in 1907. Once a node for the circulation of people, goods, and information, the site now transforms into an investigation of information flow and truth structures. The corridor's confining walls create a space-within-space. This architectural withholding propels viewers toward strategic fissures whose precise angles and orientations constitute the artist's calculated system of disclosure and concealment. Surveillance cameras discreetly capture ground activities, projecting live footage into unexpected corners. As spectators navigate this field, they are drawn into a recursive loop of observation and exposure, shifting from observer to observed—a sudden inversion that materializes contingent positions within information systems.
Within this field of multiple fault lines, truth dissipates across intersecting strata of text, image, material, space, and emergent life—apprehensible only through limited fissures, perpetually evading complete capture.
Yiyao Tang, born in Wenzhou, China, in 1996, now lives and works in New York and Shanghai. She received her BFA from Pratt Institute in 2018 and her MA from Harvard University in 2023. Tang’s practice coalesces mediums of intervention, projection, and installation to explore how social and political systems are embedded within images and objects. Using personal devices and inventive setups, she constructs and contests ideas on freedom, trauma, justice, otherness, and memory. Her setups behave twofold: both object and subject of her ideas, often leading to unpredictable outcomes themselves. More than just an archival account, Tang’s approach approximates archaeology in her ongoing process of uncovering evidence of our own contemporary artefacts, collective memories, and climactic traumas.
Her solo and two-person exhibitions include: The Currents We Carry, Hong Museum, Wenzhou, 2025; Faulting, Gallery Vacancy, Shanghai, 2024; Mattering, theBlanc Gallery, New York, 2023; Precarious, Kirkland Gallery, Cambridge, 2022. She is the recipient of the Cafe Royal Cultural Foundation Visual Grant, New York, 2024; the Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts Residency Program, Omaha, 2024; and the Swatch Art Peace Hotel Artist Residency, Shanghai, 2023.
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