Wang Yi presents his solo exhibition "ICON PARADIGM" at PLATFORM CHINA
ICON PARADIGM
Wang Yi
2025.06.21-2025.07.20
PLATFORM CHINA
“I grew up in a coal mining town, witnessing how industrial structures became deeply embedded in daily life. Both my grandfathers were miners, carrying a heroic aura of coal dust mixed with sweat – that silent strength has been etched in my memory, seeped into my skin, and became the fundamental logic through which I perceive the world.”
— Wang Yi
ICON PARADIGM Installation View
ICON PARADIGM Installation View
ICON PARADIGM Installation View
ICON PARADIGM Installation View
Icons have always served as a mirror of their era. In his exhibition, Wang Yi assembles iconic images from different periods – the builders in Mexican murals, cosmonauts from Soviet space-age propaganda, and Golden Age Hollywood movie stars. These represent the aspirations, worship, and fervor of bygone eras. The artist treats these as textual resources, reducing them through digital character modeling into sets of basic modules, endowing culturally specific icons with universal foundational units. These standardized elements originate from history while responding to the past through contemporary imagery. This approach may transcend being merely a striking aesthetic paradigm, evolving instead into a perspective and mode of thinking – where basic models construct idols like building blocks, while simultaneously dissolving idols into technological source code. As Nietzsche observed, “God is merely a human error” – a statement that not only reevaluates existing values but also the very act of reevaluation itself. Wang Yi’s reconstruction of idols precisely mirrors the eternal cycle of self-cognition, an endless pursuit of generation and recurrence, until icons lose concrete form and context, gradually sliding through abstraction into a realm of absurdity and existential void.
Toward Future
2024-2025
Acrylic and gypsum on wood
336 × 392 cm
Luncheon on the Grass
2024
Acrylic on canvas
170 × 210 cm
The Painter and His Wife
2025
Acrylic and gypsum on canvas
123 × 156 cm
The Three Graces
2024-2025
Acrylic and gypsum on wood
280 × 336 cm
Frida and Her Portrait
2025
Acrylic and gypsum on canvas
123 × 156 cm
