Ziping Wang
Unit London is excited to announce a solo exhibition with the artist, Ziping Wang. The show is now open and features as the next instalment in the online exhibitions programme, Platform. During this time, Platform serves as an ever-important means of bringing Ziping’s solo exhibition into people’s homes. The virtual viewing space allows the artist to address and respond to a range of real-world social issues in a concentrated and concise manner. Through Platform, Ziping’s artwork will be accessible to all and brought to the attention of a truly global audience.
To support the core social principle of the programme, 10% of all sales proceeds from each exhibition will be donated to a charity nominated by the artist. For her solo show, Ziping has nominated the Center for Humane Technology: a charity organisation with a goal to shift the mindset of persuasive technology systems to ensure they are realigned with humanity’s best interests.
Ziping Wang in her studio, 2020
The works Ziping presents for this exhibition boldly confront society’s constantly evolving relationship with technology, examining the intimate, yet, complex dynamic of this relationship. In this vein, Ziping’s paintings choose to address a society that is no longer technologically naïve. In today’s world, as various tech companies continually battle it out for a leading position in the attention economy, we have become visually inundated. We are persistently besieged by the increasingly uncompromising imagery of online advertising and pop-ups, which are all specifically designed to be attention grabbing. This widespread information overload can lead to an increased level of anxiety amongst individuals. Ziping’s works directly deal with this issue of invasive tech, forming part of a debate at the forefront of contemporary society.
Ziping’s paintings are comprised of colourful collated imagery, which all separately demands the viewer’s attention. Her works strive to capture mental moments of anxiety and are therefore characterised by their fragmentary nature. Still lives, saturated tonal areas, pop cultural and art historical references are all blended together to create these striking collage-like paintings that mirror the fragmented contemporary mindset.
Resting by the Sidewalk, 2020, oil painting on wooden panel, 18 x 24 cm
Ziping’s artistic method reflects her concerns; she edits, crops and overlays before she even starts to paint. Editing is often overtly evident in online imagery and, for the artist, it is important to draw attention to traces of editing within her works. Her paintings document the editing process by simultaneously revealing and concealing different fields of imagery. As such, Ziping highlights the gap that separates idealised imagery from that of the real world. Through her works, she seeks to impart and encourage a feeling of suspicion by stressing the level of personalised curation that takes place when constructing an image of reality. As such, Ziping’s artworks embolden our own sense of scepticism by differentiating between reality and curated imagery.
Born in 1995 in Shenyang, China, Ziping graduated from Rhode Island school of Design in 2017 before undertaking her MFA degree at Pratt Institute. She was awarded first place in a juried exhibition with Archway Gallery in Houston, and has exhibited with Winston Wachter Fine Art in New York, Gallery LVS in Seoul, Korea, and Gessoisland Artspace in Shenyang, China.