Wang Yahui: Voyager

On September 12, the exhibition Wang Yahui: Voyager will be unveiled on the second floor of Taipei Fine Arts Museum (TFAM). Co-curated by TFAM curators Lei Yi-ting and Hsuan-chun Lin, this retrospective exhibition looks back on Wang Yahui’s 20-year artistic career (2002 to 2022). Through 25 works and work series from different periods, it presents her passage of creativity through video, kinetic installation and photography, set alongside early works, video documentation, sketches, drafts, and written notes. Grounded in living spaces and everyday experiences, over many years Wang contemplated the dialogue between emptiness and solidity, by transforming subtle observations into poetic images. Her abstract, constantly moving approach expanded how viewers sensed and imagined everything from a tiny speck of dust to the whole universe.

The exhibition takes inspiration from a major work of Wang Yahui’s later period, Traveler (2019). Its title comes from the “Voyager” space probe launched by NASA in 1977, which traversed the solar system for nearly 40 years before entering interstellar space in 2012. The dimensions of time and space referenced in the artwork also mirror Wang’s long-term creative path. The exhibition extends the concept of “travel,” moving between familiar everyday life and the unknown to discover new viewpoints of the world.

Wang Yahui once wrote, “The vastness of the universe is measured in distance, beyond the reach of human effort in all its insignificance, yet at certain moments, the human spirit may sense the essence of the whole universe.” For her, time was not a perfectly straight road one could march along, but a flowing course constantly born from encounters. Human existence may seem fleeting and minute, yet precisely because of its finiteness, it is rare and precious. This retrospective explores the trajectory of perception, transformation, re-expression and progression in her works throughout her various stages, like a mysterious, immeasurable image of the cosmos. It travels with the artist on a voyage of images measured by the coordinates of time and space.

Wang Yahui began making video art in the early 2000s, and throughout her journey she combined it with personal descriptions of her work. The exhibition explores the contexts of her artworks through four recurrent themes: “Personal Room and Objects,” “Nature and the World,” “Time/Space and the Universe,” and “Paintingness and Image/Space.” It also features an Archive Room, presenting nine early videos, a chronology of the artist’s work, papers, sketches, manuscripts, notes, and early videos, as well as a brief film discussing her art. The records and works in the Archive Room will inform visitors of Wang’s thoughts and transformations at different stages of her career. For many years Wang made her art with new media or electronic devices, which she interpreted through low-tech methods or handmade props, and ultimately presented in image form. Her works hovered somewhere between abstract and figurative, material and immaterial, realistic and illusory, opening up a new avenue for the evolution of Taiwanese video art that was personal and vivid.

In addition, at this exhibition One and One (2022)—the artist’s final work before her passing—is being shown for the first time in Taiwan. Exactly 20 years passed from her first video work Falling in 2002 to One and One. Looking back on Wang Yahui’s creative sojourn, she always used images as a means to explore the world, constantly pushing video to the boundaries of space, time, materiality and paintingness. The exhibition’s four guiding themes are not independent, but mutually overlap, moving back and forth between daily life and the imaginary, the close-up and the faraway, so that the act of viewing becomes a voyage continually in motion. “Wang Yahui: Voyager” invites everyone to follow the eye of the traveler and wander on this journey marked by the coordinates of time and space, to look afresh at those things that seem familiar but contain infinite possibility.