Soka Art is proud to kick off 2022 with Ting-Yu Wang’s new solo exhibition, Heavenly Waters. The exhibition will be held for 8 weeks from January 8th to March 5th. Echoing his previous exhibitions “Charting with Constellation” (2016), “Sky Messenger” (2019), and “Verdiales of the Forsaken Hamlet” (2020), this exhibition is named after one of the eight constellation families, Heavenly Waters, which mainly focuses on Aquarius and water-related themes. Unlike his previous works, the artist now places a greater emphasis on color arrangements as well as gaming elements and concepts that lead viewers to explore seemingly familiar images and ponder the profound meaning behind each painting.

Wang is known for portraying his observations of our times through the style and language of painting. In his most well-known constellation series, Wang arranges mixed media and cross-generational images on the canvas to form delicately detailed, richly layered star charts and maps. This exhibition features constellations including Cancer, Pisces, and Cetus. Searching online, Wang handpicks theme-related images and arranges the seemingly random yet somehow associated images into coherent collages. “Sleeping Fortress” presents the constellation Cancer through geometric shapes, home-style and architectural spatial elements, as well as military elements and game console buttons. The combination of these elements forms a fluid, organic retrieval of contemporary images with an abundance and diversity that provide viewers with a boundless space for contemplation and interpretation.

On the technical aspect, Wang uses the unique “stacking line-drawing method” to create equal height images that resemble moveable type or wood engraving designs. This “equal height” design can be further expanded to a metaphysical equality, implying how humans perceive the world via the Internet based on a shared sense of basic equality. In addition to applying his expertise in layering techniques, this time Wang also developed the gradient technique to create a “heavenly” atmosphere for Heavenly Waters. The generation of “heavenly” effects requires extreme attention to details along with abundant patience to gradually stack layers that display an equally distributed level of color transitioning. Moreover, the greatest challenge lies in the ingenuity of integrating homogeneous textures on the canvas with heterogeneous hard-edge color blocks into a single image. Wang is able to coordinate such an integration through his natural, unique aesthetic instincts and well-developed skills over the years. As Wang concluded in the exhibition introduction, “In the past, painting textures and hard-edged color blocks used to be as incompatible as oil and water. Given the huge gap between their forms and content, my job is to be a ‘lotion’, or a more skin-friendly substance between oil and water.”

In line with the context of gaming elements in his previous works, Wang has also incorporated retro 8-bits bitmaps into this exhibition along with the open map concept of roguelike games. The composition of “Table Mountain Showers” is based on game maps whereby every box is like a checkpoint that opens up a new route. The fast food icons formed by bitmaps in the boxes are full of fun vintage ideas, as the overall image presents the framework style of electronic product interfaces. To Wang, “the scenery is fixed yet the interface is fluid. Different uses and arrangements of bars, buttons, scroll bars, and rollers will ultimately result in different scenery.” While natural scenery can only be viewed passively, the operational interfaces form images that can be viewed actively as the scenery is determined by viewers. As real and virtual increasingly overlap, Wang’s works not only serve as reflections on our dependence on electronic products, but also inspire us to openly examine the influence of technology in our lives and perceptions of the world.