Beijing Commune is proud to announce the opening of Wang Luyan’s solo exhibition “Curved Folding Space” on September 24, 2020. The show presents the artist’s latest creation, the eponymous series, and will run till November 10, 2020. Wang Luyan regards the relationship between things as mutually entangled gravitational forces, just like the relationship between two points, A and B, in the folding space, where their strong gravitational forces cause the space to bend, so that they draw closer together until they overlap. The artist manifests various “curved” people, incidents and objects by transferring them from three-dimensional space into existence in the foldable two-dimensional plane. For him, these twisted forms in the folding space are actually the hidden phenomena underneath the three-dimensional space that our lives reply upon.  

The exhibition presents fifteen wall pieces from the series “Curved Folding Space”. A row of images scanned from Wang Luyan's hand-drawn line sketches and printed on the clear films align at eye level, moving linearly around the four walls. The content is intended to be interpreted in a counterclockwise direction. The deliberately reduced size of the works emphasizes the readability of the conceptuality of the work and weakens any pleasure that might come with the viewing experience. As a bendable material, the clear plastic film leaves only the outline of the objects, stripping off the concealment of the image to the greatest extent. The folded and distorted images are then fixed with transparent tape. The artist makes sure that all the transformation processes are reversible. Within the same work, the same content is displayed in two-dimensional space and folding space in different and even completely opposite forms. For Wang Luyan, the entire exhibition space is already an invisible "folding space", in which everything is distorted like the work: the standing person shown by the two-dimensional plane space is "bent" by the folding space into a kneeling position; the folded space appears to be non-directional...

The series takes social reality as an entry point, depicting specific phenomena such as shooters without targets and communicators, while the themes are gradually abstracted until they return to the most essential geometric figures and line segments. At the end, the artist's portrait reversely starts from a folded scroll and morphs backwards into a complete manifestation on the two-dimensional plan. This is the artist's infinite retrogressive questioning of Münchhausen's triple dilemma, as the “certainty” in the traditional knowledge system is in damage. The artist’s exploration makes the entire exhibition an endless recursion without any basis for argumentation.  

The show strives to observe and show the phenomena that cannot be seen in three-dimensional space from the perspective of the twisted folding space with the help of simulated folding space and its reference frame. The artist incorporates the reality that occurs in the three-dimensional space into the folding space and manifests the hidden shapes bent by the folding fault that.  

Wang Luyan (b. 1956) has been a major participant in the developmental history of Chinese modern and contemporary art. He was a part of the historic “Stars Art Exhibition” in 1979, and the China / Avant-Garde Exhibition in 1989. In 1988, together with Gu Dexin, he created Tactile Sensation. Between 1988 and 1995, he was a member of the New Measurement Group, together with Gu Dexin and Chen Shaoping. He has held solo exhibitions in many important institutions over the years, including Beijing Commune, Beijing (2018); Yalu River Art Museum, Dandong, China (2017); the Space of DRC No. 12, Beijing (2016); National Statidum Bird’s Nest Art Center, Beijing (2015); Musée d'art moderne et contemporain de Saint-Etienne, France (2014); Parkview Green Exhibition Hall, Beijing (2013); Total Museum, Seoul (2010); OCT Contemporary Art Terminal, Shenzhen (2007) and more. His works have been exhibited in Museum of Modern Art Oxford, Oxford; New Berlin Art Society (NBK), Berlin; Asia Society and P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center, New York; Oceanographic Museum, Monaco; Ekaterina Foundation, Moscow; the National Museum of China, Beijing, etc. Wang Luyan has also participated in the Second Asia-Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art, Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane (1996) and the First Guangzhou Triennial, Guangdong Museum of Art, Guangzhou, 2002.