Wang Du – Les Modes, Permanent Ephemera – Laurent Godin
Wang Du assimilates ordinary actions (crumpling, folding, ripping and discarding newspapers
and papers) to a sculptural gesture. These three bronze sculptures are huge enlargements of
newspaper pages in different languages: Arabic, American and Russian. By means of the
technique employed –clay modeling and lost-wax bronze casting- he creates a tension between
the ephemeral, volatile and fragile character of information and the muted, monumental
materiality of bronze.
Wang Du (born in Wuhan, 1956) emigrated to Paris one year after the Beijing massacre. He
deeply distrusts media images, and his misgivings are by non means confined to current politics
in his homeland. Newspapers and images, central symbol of our mediatized reality, are an
important component of his art, they almost ideally embodies the contemporary mode of
function of media whose manner of editing, processing and circulating information exercises
considerable control over the way we perceive the world and reality. As he professes once : « I
want to be a media ».
Francisco Sobrino – Galerie Mitterrand
