Ziping Wang 3x3

ZIPING WANG 3x3

Online Presentation

Drawing on the visual languages of advertising and illustration, Ziping Wang creates paintings and drawings inspired by the overwhelming experience of living within an attention economy in the digital era, in which we are relentlessly bombarded by pop-ups, banners, notifications, and endlessly refreshing feeds. 

Visually seductive packaging found while strolling the supermarket aisles often serves as the starting point for Wang’s saturated, colorful configurations that combine a wide array of pictorial references and styles, ranging from cartoonish renderings of food, traditional Chinese and Japanese decorative motifs, Old Master still lifes, geometrically patterned forms, and amorphous blobs of varying opacity. 

Amidst these latter components is the recurring grey and white grid recognizable as the transparent layer of an image in Photoshop. These checkered patterns sweep across the various planes of assembled imagery in long, pleasing curves that guide our eyes across the canvas, allowing us to ‘read’ each composition while simultaneously disrupting our ability to make sense of their spatial logic. Together, these elements seek to subtly remind us that what we see online is but a construct of endlessly modified images, built from our personal data sets of desires, fears, aspirations, and biases.