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"In technologically advanced societies, our experiences of the world are under constant invasion from brightly colored advertisements, pop up window browsers and catchy slogans, all designed to be distracting. The constant overload of information generates anxiety."
As tech companies vie for position in the attention economy, the imagery with which we are targeted is becoming increasingly saturated, increasingly abrasive. Ziping wants to not only capture this caustic aesthetic, but also the feeling it instills in the public: the fluttering anxiety of a gif, the sudden pang of a popup, or the bland ubiquity of a stale slogan. These specific curatorial tactics end up creating billions of digital worlds, each one unique to each user - thus creating the oft-used mantra that technology is tearing us apart as opposed to bringing us together. Through her work, Ziping wants to enhance our levels of skepticism, we have to remain vigilant, continue to look and see these tactics for what they truly are: ploys for keeping our attention.
Her works, being both striking and claustrophobic, stand up to critical viewing, they engage unapologetically with the issue at hand; what makes them stand out is that they grapple with such topics and feelings with uncompromising charm and beauty. Ziping’s works do not just signify certain societal issues, they also act as a visual tonic for them.
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Ziping’s artistic technique mirrors her concerns: she composes, edits, crops, overlays and finally paints the pieces. They are paintings in fragments, echoing the contemporary phenomena of the fragmentation of the frantic mind. In contrast to traditional oil painting approaches such as underpainting and block-in, she treats each inch of the canvas equally by harmonizing the surface texture and paint consistency. She normally paints from one corner to the other corner like a human printer. After she finishes an area she doesn’t revisit it, so the painting is divided into areas of blank canvas and those that are 100 percent finished, echoing the binary nature of our technological existences.
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Works
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Ziping Wang was born in 1995 in Shenyang, China. Ziping previously graduated from Rhode Island school of Design before completing her MFA degree at Pratt Institute. She was selected as the first place for 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.
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