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WANG ZHIYUAN

Ван Чжиюань
王智远

Thrown to the Wind

WANG ZHIYUAN THROWN TO THE WIND

source: revistapegnglobo
Cerca de 3 milhões de toneladas de lixo doméstico são gerados por dia no planeta. Você já teve a sensação de que o único jeito de acabar com todos esses resíduos seria mandá-los para o espaço? É justamente essa a ideia que uma escultura exposta em Pequim, na China, passa.

Feita pelo artista Wang Zhiyuan, essa torre de lixo de quase 11 metros de altura se chama Thrown to the Wind (jogado ao vento). O artista diz que queria retratar os montes de resíduos que se acumulam em sua cidade e chamar a atenção para o problema. “Eu quero que a minha arte seja algo maior do que eu. Se ela não estivesse envolvida em problemas da sociedade, eu me sentiria culpado”, afirma.
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source: amarilloverdeyazul
Los medios de comunicación cada vez se hacen mayor eco de los grandes problemas de contaminación que acosan a las grandes ciudades de China, muy especialmente a Beijing (antes todos la llamábamos Pekín…), su capital. Los habitantes de esa ciudad no solo sufren las graves consecuencias de la contaminación del aire sino también de los suelos por un exceso de residuos. Por eso, el artista Wang Zhiyuan (Tianjin, 1958) quiso reflejar en 2010 su visión artística de este problema en la ciudad que vive y trabaja con una espectacular escultura hecha de envases de plástico. La obra se llama Thrown to the wind (lo traduciríamos como “Arrojados al viento”) y representa un impresionante tornado de 11 metros de alto “inspirado en las avalanchas de basura que desfiguran Beijing y sus alrededores”. Con ella, Zhiyuan quiso denunciar el exceso de residuos y poner su granito de arena para que las personas nos concienciemos de que “los envases y otros objetos que desechamos y rechazamos son más preciosos de lo que pensamos y podríamos verlos con una segunda mirada”. Es decir, ¡que los podemos reutilizar o reciclar!
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source:
“If someone asked me, ‘What do you do?’ I would answer, ‘I use all my time and energy to perfect useless, but very complicated objects … I’m completely uninterested in anything that is useful or functional.’ ”

Born Tianjin, 1958. Lives and works in Beijing

Many of Wang Zhiyuan’s early works were collections of wall-mounted silhouettes that could be viewed either as individual items grouped together, or a single sculpture broken into fragments. Magic Box (2001), for example, presents a variety of common objects as toys erupting from a partly open box on the floor. Some of these works contained underpants, whose ambiguous meanings soon commandeered the artist’s creative attention. Starting with flat pink briefs in low bas-relief, he employed the motif more and more boldly, until by 2008 he was making giant underpants carved like antique bronze (Unearthed Artefact, 2007–08) or decked with neon signs with musical accompaniment (Object of Desire, 2008). More recently, he has turned to even less “beautiful” themes: rubbish both physical and verbal. Thrown to the Wind (2010) is an 11-metre-high tornado of plastic inspired by the avalanches of rubbish that deface Beijing and the countryside around it. For Wang Zhiyuan, the things we discard or reject are always worth a second look—and may be lovelier than we thought, or even uglier. Close to the Warm (2013) takes this idea in a more abstract direction, commenting on the decay of language into verbal sludge. The installation consists of a single hanging light bulb and thousands of stickers printed with words and slogans, which cluster around the light like flies. “All these words are dying clichés,” he explains, adding that words in China have been politicised so relentlessly and for so long that their meanings have been corrupted or lost. His placement of the paper word-flies in relation to the light reflects this: “The good and the bad, and the black and the white are often mixed up and sometimes even reversed.”