Yuyan Wang
∗1989, China
Yuyan Wang (1989, Qingdao, China) lives and works between Paris and Corsica. She is a filmmaker and video artist primarily working with found footage, which she rearranges, dismantles, and re-edits into new filmic works. In her videos, Wang reflects on the mechanisms of production, consumption, and assimilation within the image industry. Through her editing, the artist assigns new meanings and hierarchies to the fragments of found footage, creating immersive sensory environments.“Throughout my work-flow, my body has to consume a massive number of images. I started thinking of the retina almost like a plant doing photosynthesis, transforming light into cognition, memory, or imagination”, the artist states. “I’m always interested in the endless media production underpinned by industrial productivity. This industrialization of satisfying images fascinates me. They are so intensely consumed, fanatically produced, and just as fervently copied and spread. They might not only be taken to be seen but rather to be shared, moved, and manipulated, sometimes by humans, more often by algorithms.”
At the center of Sala Trenker, Wang presents Green Grey Black Brown (2024), a video installation that immerses viewers in a synthetic landscape of flowing oil and plastic. Composed of found footage from industrial and commercial contexts, including plastic production sites in South China, the work examines the shifting meanings of images as they circulate across different systems of use and dissemination.
Through rhythmic editing and a slowed-down soundtrack of Owner of a Lonely Heart, the installation unfolds as a dense, looping environment. Viscous surfaces, dark liquids, and synthetic textures merge into a continuous flow, blurring distinctions between natural and artificial forms.
Positioned within the enclosed architecture of the room, the work intensifies a sense of immersion and disorientation while the visitor can sit on the fake grass carpet that surrounds the installation. What emerges is a speculative landscape shaped by extraction and transformation, where oil appears as both material and metaphor—binding together processes of production, circulation, and consumption.
