Inaugurating the Rockbund’s new artistic program, WangShui’s first solo exhibition is an immersive experience through a shape-shifting installation of never standing still paintings. The artworks on display mark the relaunch of the Rockbund Art Museum (RAM) under the new Artistic Director, X Zhu-Nowell.

WangShui is known for blending different formats together, creating a multilayered intersection between paintings, installations, and video. Poiesis, from the Greek word “bringing something into being”, expands upon WangShui’s artistic research into integrating different agents into the art piece. While interrogating the logic of perception, the New York-based artist builds on an exploration of human consciousness. The immersive exhibition traverses the museum’s fourth and fifth floors and consists of eighth aluminium floor paintings. Following a choreography driven by the ultrasonic frequencies collected and processed by an algorithm, the paintings change position throughout the duration of the show. Unlike conventional Western paintings, WangShui intricately abrades images into aluminium panels and applies paint to illuminate the scratches, creating paintings characterized by shifting light and movement.  

Kvadrat has proudly contributed to the immersive exhibition by sponsoring 180 meters of Mori, a clear and architectural curtain with a subtle grid-like effect. 

Rockbund Art Museum
20 Huqiu Rd, Shanghai

1 April 2023 – 11 June 2023
Monday closed
Tuesday - Sunday 10 – 18

About WangShui

WangShui’s work explores structures of perception. Through video, sculpture, painting, and installation, they examine the loops of mediation that form our experience of the world. The artist’s interdisciplinary practice seeks to integrate diverse personal experiences and research into trauma, architecture, and media. A central theme in the work is liminality and its radical potential as a form of resistance. WangShui often addresses the latent space of images and materials as a way to activate the hallucinatory states between detail and distance, transparency and opacity, knowing and unknowing.

About Rockbund Art Museum, Shanghai

Inaugurated in 2010, the Rockbund Art Museum (RAM) is a contemporary art museum located on the Bund in Shanghai. The museum is housed in a historic Art Deco building from 1932 that was originally one of the first modern museums established in China. The landmark building was renovated by David Chipperfield. In considering what it means to be an Asia-based contemporary art museum in the 21st century, RAM aims to explore the importance of “archipelago thinking”: connecting to artistic culture across Asia and beyond to gain richer perspectives on today’s challenges, practices, and networks within contemporary artistic practices.