Imagery with real impact
Materials being as exorbitantly expensive as they are, it is very difficult for any sculptor to focus exclusively on creative work. After graduation, in order to make a living, Wang took a job in a factory making reproductions, serving as an assistant to a senior artist and handling the more onerous preparatory tasks.
In 2001, Wang entered the graduate program in fine arts at Taipei National University of the Arts. Engulfed in an enormous whirlpool of creative energy, on top of his own hard-earned practical experience learned in the factory, he quickly captured a series of prizes. In fact, between 2001 and 2004 he won seven awards, major and minor, from across the country. Nothing seemed beyond his reach, and he was able to sustain himself for a long time on the prize money alone (over NT$800,000 in all).
It was during this period that Wang became confirmed in his decision to pursue a realist style, but with a twist. He wanted to show that realist sculpture could be more than just a depiction of a person, or a narrative of an event, but could also carry symbolic meaning—that is, imagery. Two works he produced in 2002, Reflection (with a classmate serving as his model) and Stopping, are emphatic statements of the idea of abstract imagery in very solid and recognizable human forms. The works were instant critical successes.
Reflection is made of mixed media: colored resin and acrylic. Wang made two identical sculptures of the upper body of a man, posed with his hands covering his face, and then placed one on each side of a transparent acrylic slab, creating the effect of a mirror image. In the exhibition space, the piece is hung from the ceiling by fishing line, creating the visual effect of a person floating in mid-air. The overall feeling is thus one of lightness, but the spot lighting brings out with great clarity the tension of the muscles in the arms caused by their supporting the man’s head, lending a contradictory denseness to the piece.
In the exhibition space, the light breeze generated by a fan sets the sculpture slightly swaying, adding a somewhat scary, or at least unstable, element. The work evokes a variety of metaphorical contrasts, but expresses them through a form that is all the more persuasive because it is true to life. Wang seems to be pointing to somewhere deep in all of us, and saying that “reflection” can be both perilous and profound.
In Stopping, made from the mixed media of plaster and plywood, the torso of a naked man (the same model as for Reflection) emerges from a table, hands pressing down on the surface and edges, in an embarrassing predicament of pushing with all his might but being unable to free himself. His upper body is tense and slightly trembling with effort, with the biceps at maximum exertion. But the lower body is composed not of two human legs, but the four long and slender table legs, creating a juxtaposition of heaviness above and lightness below.
As art critic Hong Lizhu notes, Wang, unlike many artists, has not looked on realist sculpture as simply a transitional phase one must go through to get to something else. Wang, she says, is “virtually obsessed” with the accurate replication of the human form. “Viewers will ultimately realize that this is a performance by a group of sculptures, with the viewer him- or herself becoming part of this group of life-sized figures, making us performers and living sculptures in this space.”
Mutual Figure is another divided human form. The surface has the musculature of a male, but wrapped inside the male exterior is a female body.