Episode 034 WangShui
Show Notes
This week on the show we’re visiting with brilliant artist WangShui, whose work prominently featured in this year’s Whitney Biennial is very much a continuation of their introspection and exploration of post-humanism, trans identity, and human/machine collaboration – in the form of etchings and paintings on aluminum performed in collaboration with a carefully cultivated AI collaborator, and a real-time, generative, interwoven LED mesh and screen-based video piece. In this chat we not only dive deeply into the juicy technical and material details of WangShui’s work, but also hear their very personal origin story as an artist.
Links from the conversation with WangShui
> https://www.wangshui.co
> From Its Mouth Came a River of High-End Residential Appliances: https://youtu.be/HpiXEDJ_1YU
> The 2022 Whitney Biennial: https://whitney.org/exhibitions/2022-biennial?section=60#exhibition-artworks
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Transcript
[00:00:00] Ben: From Small data Industries, this is Art and Obsolescence. I'm your host, Ben Feener Radin and on this show, I chat with people that are shaping the past present and future of art and technology. This week on the show, we are visiting with an artist.
[00:00:15] WangShui: Hi, I'm WangShui.
[00:00:22] Ben: I am so excited to share this chat with you all. I have been obsessed with WangShui's work for a few years now, ever since I saw their video piece titled From its Mouth Came a River of High End Residential Appliances. A piece that depicts these slow sweeping drone camera shots that fly through giant cutouts in skyscrapers, in Hong Kong. All well, the artist's voice narrates and weaves in and out of explaining the social and political history of Feng Shui and the artist's own life and identity. New work by WangShui is prominently featured in this year's Whitney Biennial and is very much a continuation of their simultaneous introspection into post humanism, trans identity and human machine collaboration. And we'll dive into the juicy technical and material details of all of this in today's conversation, not to mention hearing the artist held their origin story, as we always do on this show.
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[00:01:59] WangShui: I've always made art, but for the most of my life, it was a very private practice. I would say, as a transgender neurodivergent child, growing up in a very conservative Christian disciplinarian home in Southern California, I was always hiding under my dad's desk or in linen closets drawing in my sketchbooks. It was a safe space for me and me and my siblings were homeschooled. So our education revolved around the Bible and my parents were extremely strict about any media we were exposed to. By middle school, my parents moved our family to Chiang Mai Thailand to become Christian missionaries.
It was a huge kind of seismic shift for me. It was kind of really jarring, but in retrospect was kind of the best thing that happened to me in a way. I mean, it was very challenging and because of my parents kind of ideological positions, I always had a very contentious, rebellious relationship to them. And, as a child. I knew I wanted to escape them and so I became a very rigorous athlete as a child. And I, for some reason, got in my head that I wanted to be a professional hockey player as. Gained independence. And so I would practice about five hours a day alone, and I joined all these leagues and kind of got a bunch of awards and people thought I was on a pro track. And so when my parents decided to move to Thailand, it ruined my entire exit plan. When, but when I look back on it, it was such an, a, it was such an American kind of exit plan. It was an American dream in a way, to find independence through some industry like sports. And in that way, I think when they ruined my exit plan, it was really liberating for me because, we're also, I might be a pro athlete now, which would be really scary.
The late nineties was like a moment of extreme modernization in Chiang Mai where fragments of new freeway was, were being built all around the city in what felt like a jungle. So at night, I would sneak out to these kinds of abandoned freeways and tag on them with spray paint and then later in high school I was known as a pretty serious athlete, but I was actually secretly spending a lot of alone time in a forgotten dark room at the edge of our campus that I quietly reopened. So I was always disappearing to make art. At the time I had very little exposure to contemporary art because there wasn't any sort of art scene in Chiang Mai that I was aware of or had access to. It wasn't until I returned to Los Angeles after high school, that I started encountering contemporary art in a real way. At that point, I wasn't speaking to my parents was cut off and working multiple menial jobs, learning how to survive as an adult in a country. I didn't know very well. And it's kind of why I started enrolling in art classes at the local community college in my free time, just to kind of cut through it all.
And you know, I discovered so many new techniques there and became really obsessed with art history. And I quickly realized the obvious, which was that higher education was the only feasible way out of this kind of banal American poverty cycle I got stuck into. And I honestly didn't have many figures in my life giving me that sort of advice at the time. So I kind of had to figure it out the hard way. So I began taking classes full time while at some points, working up to three jobs at once. And it was a lot, but I've always thought that I had to work three times harder than anyone else just to kind of catch up to what, many people, you know, were born into. I didn't fully have a framework yet, but I knew I liked cameras and I really was drawn to photography and moving image. But meanwhile, I maintained a kind of drawing practice my entire life. It was not ever something that I presented to the public and I think it connects back to like being a child and having drawing as a resource for myself. I somehow managed to do well in my classes and transferred to UC Berkeley, the best kind of public school I could afford at the time. I still couldn't really imagine or justify myself as an artist. So I studied social anthropology and then double majored in art practice. The undergrads didn't get studios so I spent a lot of late nights in the printmaking lab and eventually found a floor of the architecture building that was supposedly under construction, but was just abandoned and I secretly cleared out all the debris of a corner and set up a makeshift studio there with large drop cloths and it was amazing like I figured out a lot there and I had it for a whole semester before I got caught and gentrified. I've always had to look for these neglected spaces that became really productive, spaces for me to continue my practice. Since it was such a Berkeley was such a massive public school even if you had teachers invested in you, no one actually really had time for you. So five years later, when I entered an MFA program at Bard, I really felt the difference. It was probably the first time that I felt supported or seen as an artist. Even though I experienced this sort of deep sense of socioeconomic class alienation there having a handful of students and faculty who encouraged me was really transformative. And it was there that I slowly learned to become more comfortable sharing what I had been doing in private for so long. I was in the film video department and in a way I would say that I've always been deeply drawn to loops without knowing why and working with digital media, like video felt like the most accessible way for me to engage with them as forms. This eventually led me to more recursive loops, like live streams and thinking through the metabolic cycles of media ecologies, like the news or pop culture and then I read a really important book for me by Douglas Hofstadter called I am a strange loop and it really connected a lot of dots for me between sort of quantum physics and the architectures of kind of trauma that dictated so much of my upbringing. People who experienced deep physical and emotional trauma often undergo disassociation and disembodiment to cope with pain and as a result, they get lost and stuck in these strange limbic loops before they learn to pendulate fully and reintegrate layers of their consciousness. And, recently I kind of realized there was this huge connection between these kind of loops I was stuck in, on a personal level with the kind of forms I was really seeking and finding some sort of comfort in my work. You know, It's something I've been thinking a lot about lately in relationship to my work, because, the pandemic was time for me of deep reckoning with these kind of personal traumas. For a long time, I kind of realized that it was these digital tools that were, you know, what kept me in touch with my own senses, during periods of kind of dark disembodiment.
Bard was a really transformative place for me because there was a lot of attention that the students got and we did about 40 studio visits over the course of two months, every summer, faculty coming and doing kind of one hour studio visits, you know, it was kind of like a severe boot camp that I personally found a lot of energy in, you know, I had been working in the dark for so long and I knew there was some point that I needed to get feedback, to kind of break through these barriers I had come up against. Having that much feedback for me was really, really generative. And I also didn't have a studio at the time so even having this tiny little editing suite, they gave you in first year of film, video was really major to me and I was in there all the time. I think a lot of students thought I was very antisocial, but I was just very excited to be making work and improving my work with feedback that I never had access to before. Education never came easy to me I really had to seek it out. So I've always deeply appreciated and, never took it for granted. So being in a private school setting where I got that much attention it was so new to me and I was thriving in it. Pedagogically, they were against bringing any sort of, professionalism into that space. You know, I think it was sort of designed us this as space of criticism and improvement and that was kind of a double-edged sword. To me, it was unrealistic to kind of hide certain things, but I would say overall, it did kind of simulate a sort of microcosm of the art world cause it was you know, a hundred students every summer and it was really jam packed and high pressure. In your first summer, you would have to do a critique of your work that you made in a month in front of the entire student body, and that was really severe looking back at it. But I don't know. I think because I was an athlete, going into high school and all of that, I continued being an athlete and so having that sort of fire actually really activated so much of my work.
In my second year at Bard, I got this commission from Triple Canopy to make my project From Its Mouth Came a River of High-end Residential Appliances. I presented the work in many different ways. I was very curious about how it can operate as a performance with live actors or kind of live voiceovers. But I think the version, most people I've seen as the kind of single channel video format, and it revolves around drone footage of these dragon gates in Hong Kong, which are these gaping holes in residential high rise buildings designed for mythological dragons to pass through. So in the video, there's these different dragon gates that we're kind of flying through while I have a voice over that kind of is constantly weaving between different sorts of registers of knowledge. That project, I actually had pitched to my faculty at Bard as my second year project. I was like, oh yeah, I want to go to Hong Kong and fly these drones through these Dragon Gates and they were like, well, that seems impossible. I was just like, okay and I didn't think about it, but I knew I was going to do it and I somehow got this commission for it. That was a project I never imagined anyone to really see or care about. It was kind of my first commission and I went to Hong Kong and I found the most talented drone operator in Hong Kong. And we very illegally ran around the city, hiding in bushes and flying these drones through these high rise buildings. And I had no idea what that footage was going to turn into, but I knew I needed that footage and on my flight back to New York, I actually wrote the majority of the texts that is now the voiceover for that work.
[00:15:56] Ben: Yeah. So the piece has this very sort of research-based or even documentarian kind of feel to it, you know, you're talking about the history of Feng Shui and the politics of it, and all of that and the architecture, but it's also very, diaristic and personal and at one point in the video, in the narration, in response to the drone pilot's question, when they ask why you're doing this and you explain to them that it was the only way you could become who you wanted to be. I was curious if you could speak more to that.
[00:16:30] WangShui: You know, I continued doing research around the things the footage was conjuring for me and I kept folding that research back into the text and it ended up becoming a very personal manifesto slash confession about shape-shifting across bodies, time and registers of knowledge. It is essentially a diary entry, which is why I find it so jarring that so many people have seen it and want to continue screening it. It's funny because Chrissy Iles was the first person to ever request a studio visit with me in New York and she came over to my small tiny Chinatown closet of an apartment and watched it with me and the next day called me to acquire it for the Whitney's collection. It was the first piece I ever sold. I never expected anyone to care about that work and now that it's so out there, it really holds me to, a sense of vulnerability in my work, about this kind of diaristic aspect and these really intimate details of my life and it made me realize, I do believe I have this sort of mandate to keep my work as honest and vulnerable as possible.
[00:18:02] Ben: One of the things that I love about art making is that there is no one correct model for what a studio looks like. You know, I've seen hugely successful, late career artists who have no team at all. It's just them and that's just the way they like it, and I've also seen emerging artists early in their careers with, you know, teams to support the production of their work. So I'm curious for you what does your studio look like, what does your practice look like?
[00:18:29] WangShui: It has never been consistent and you know, I've never been able to figure out how to afford a real studio in New York or Brooklyn so I've made most of my work at short term residencies that I pasted together or friends have, let me use like a corner of their studio or their space and it actually wasn't even until this year that I signed my first lease on a studio, but it was for a barn in a cow field upstate just so that I could get enough space to produce my project for the Whitney Biennial. I would say that up until this point, everything has been very project based and the studio composition, has kind of been really all over the place. But for my most recent work, I finally found this really large space and I was finally able to hire a couple's studio assistants to work on many different layers of different projects. And I got tapped into some of the undergrad arts students at Bard and they've been really amazing at helping me.
My process is very multi-directional. It's really hard for me to trace where things start, but I always think it all kind of happens at once and I just sort of follow my intuition. With the led video sculptures. I was personally really feeling this desire to work with video as a material there was a point in which projectors became very obsolete to me and I wanted to understand how to really work with the video in space. And so I started thinking about the kind of negative space between pixels, because I have the sense that images will increasingly become more transparent because of our need to consume multiple images at once and so I wanted to think about how I can find the latent space between pixels and infuse them or kind of weave other pixels from other images into them. So that was my goal with the led video sculpture it's was kind of weaving multiple images to get moving images together and having them kind of, play back simultaneously. That work looking back on it I didn't really yet know how to talk about it, but it very much led to my work with AI because all of my work with AI now is about, interpreting the latent space between images and the led sculptures, where like a real physical attempt to do that sculpturally.
[00:21:51] Ben: Well, you know, speaking of AI, as you've mentioned, and as our listeners know you are in the 2022 Whitney Biennial, and it seems like your installation synthesizes, a lot of the materials and themes that you've been working on over the course of the last few years, so I was hoping you could give us a little virtual walking tour of the installation for folks who might not get to see it.
[00:22:16] WangShui: Yeah. Well, when you enter the corner area, my work is in you'll come across three works from a new body of work titled Isle of Vitreous, and the works are composed in a cube like installation. There are two large aluminum paintings on adjacent walls and an led ceiling work that is suspended above them. The ceiling work, Scrape 2 to is composed of various types of Gans that are woven or collage together across various types of led screens. If you look closely, there are two skin like led films that are sort of metastasized into the parasitic screen which sense and dimensionalize the GANs from the main screen into 3d animations. Then there are active sensors in the work that read light levels emitted from the screens and also the CO2 levels from viewers and this data is fed back into the image generation to affect the diversion pace and even brightness of the videos. So at night, when the museum is empty, technically the work should slow and dim down to a sort of state of suspended animation.
In terms of the two wall works, I think of them as a series of post-human cave paintings that are supposed to mark a specific moment in evolution and in that sense, I think of the Isle of Vitreous as a sort of version of the Galapagos for me, but as a non place that actually exists only between structures of perception. Vitreous is of course the clear gel in mammalian eyes that allow for light to pass through to the retina. To make the paintings, I kind of took images of my previous paintings and inputted them into this AI program that then you know, interpolated the images and kind of produced new iterations of the images of the paintings with the latent space. So it actually was shooting out these new paintings at me, and one of the kind of directions it was going in was these sort of landscape paintings. People never believe me when I tell them that I look at landscape painting more than any other kind of art, but the AI actually really picked up on that and reflected it back to me. And I was really fascinated by that. So I sort of followed it and you know, it's making paintings in my style which, is relatively new in terms of my paintings, but I found it really interesting as this sort of, you know, deep challenge to how we understand, the painter as the master of their own style and what does it mean for AI to be able to interpret your style and recreate it in blink of a second. So I kind of wanted to work with that and so I followed some of these images and trained the AI to look for certain things and I would take some of those images or elements of those images and then, abrade and scratch them into the aluminum surfaces and then I would paint on top of those and, there was a lot of improvisation that happened. But to me, I kept thinking about the term deep learning that's often used in AI which is related to training and, the piece called Titration Point the whole thing is an accumulation of tiny scratches and I kept thinking about, you know, imitating or mirroring the lines produced by the AI that derived from lines I made before that and how that was a really slow process of kind of deep learning and integration with the AI.
[00:26:43] Ben: Yeah, you're kind of engaging in this sort of feedback loop with yourself and the machine.
[00:26:49] WangShui: Exactly.
[00:26:50] Ben: It's really, it's honest, it's surprising in some ways having seen your previous work and just absorbing that, in some ways you're the last artists that would expect to begin playing with GANs.
[00:27:04] WangShui: It's interesting that you say that because, I was already experiencing this place, this moment in my work where I became less invested in the individual image with my video work and more interested in these sort of datasets, and that started happening with the LED sculptures, where, you know, I was mixing, a lot of different types of footage from personal footage from my phone, like diaristic footage to found footage to things that I shot more intentionally, and there was never an intense focus on any one of the images, but about what happens when I wove them together. And now I completely understand how that has coalesced under, the structures of the GaN. I would say that AI has taught me more about myself than any person has ever taught me about myself and, you know, it's, it's funny to say that, but I really think you know, it's a tool and it's a tool that's, ladden with so much information and knowledge. I say a lot of times that my work is about perception and a lot of times it's about the failure of human perception, which is why I say that I'm moving towards post-human perception. And, I think of post-human perception as more objective because humans have to deal with all these cultural myths when trying to see the world around them, that they end up getting stuck on really bannal lies you know? And so I think to me, AI has the power to see humans better than we see ourselves and to see nature better than we see nature.
My approach to AI has been very slow and sort of natural. I found myself in a place where so many arms of my practice kind of naturally converged and coalesced in AI, but it wasn't at all intentional. I wasn't looking at AI stuff and being like, oh, that looks cool. It was the opposite I was kind of allergic to the domain of AI. But I think I found that my research into subjects of perception, post humanism, and even ecology, all gently entangled under the lens of AI in a way that felt so right to me and so personal. And that is how I approach it now, all of the ceiling work at the Whitney, it might not seem like it to someone else, but that work is very personal to me. And it's very diaristic and it's a kind of dataset that I'm just growing and plan to continue growing for the rest of my life where I add images and subjects to it that I'm thinking about deeply at the moment and kind of expanding it as a very personal form of consciousness. It's related to how I think about sensory integration. Once you start immersing yourself in the feedback loop, you become a very accountable agent in that process and to me, that's the direction our species has to go in because for so long, we've, separated ourselves from all of these other constructed categories as a way to exploit all of those other species and elements and sensory integration to me is the way of reconnecting and reentangling the paths of empathy.
[00:31:09] Ben: Yeah, well, I mean, it makes a lot of sense knowing your story and ,your artistic practice, I think for your entire career as an adult the prospect of, transcending one's limitations or self, by reducing oneself to a data set is very attractive in a way.
[00:31:30] WangShui: Yeah.
[00:31:31] Ben: So hard pivot. Relatively or comparatively speaking, you are, you know, still early in your career as an artist but I'm curious if you have had to yet encounter any conservation challenges with your work.
[00:31:47] WangShui: Yeah. I rarely have the time or capacity to even consider conservation, but the first time I thought about it was when the Walker Art Center acquired my piece Gardens of Perfect Exposure. It was the first time I was asked to really put together a manual, which was really intense because the work has so many moving parts, including live silk worms. I'm really terrible at spreadsheets and itemizing anything. I tried to really walk myself back through process of creating it. And a lot of it is constructed onsite in the installation space. I honestly kept thinking they were for sure going to cancel the acquisition when I was writing the manual, but somehow they didn't and were actually extremely patient and understanding about it which was very surprising to me personally, because I think of all of my work as a headache, because it's usually so unwieldy. I like making it, but after thinking about what's going to happen to it, or even packing it up is always like overwhelming for me. I guess, with the new AI works, they are very, very technically complex and also physically complex, and I don't know, I guess so far it seems like collectors and institutions are a bit intimidated by them. When I was installing the work at the Whitney they had this registrar that was just taking photos of everything we did and writing it down and I was like, wow, I don't live my life like that at all. I just kept thinking to myself like, good luck with this one. On one hand, I honestly feel more concerned about the survival of the planet than my work necessarily, but in another hand, I think, there's a theoretical physicist I really liked named Carlo Rovelli, who talks a lot about entropy and how space, time doesn't even exist it's just a series of events, so even objects around you, they're constantly in a process of entropy, even if you can't perceive that timescale. So there's part of me that knows that all of my work is already disintegrating. So that gives me a sort of freedom in a way and so if someone else wants to maintain it as an object and fight quantum gravity, then they can go for it. Not that I don't believe in the conservation of art, on the flip side of what I was saying in my fantasies my work outlives our species and is picked up one day by a different species and can say something about the time that we lived in. Which is the reason why I feel this important kind of responsibility to kind of speak to this moment of human machine evolution that I think we're undergoing. That's why I keep calling them cave paintings. These metal shards will be found in a fire, but they'll be etched into the surface and they'll see like a reflection of something.
[00:35:23] Ben: You just openned the Whitney Biennial, but I'm sure you have a . Next project up your sleeve. What's coming next for you?
[00:35:29] WangShui: Well, I'm making more paintings, but I'm also going to be participating in the Lyon Biennale, and that's happening in the fall. I'm actually developing this kind of aI consciousness and expressing it through Aerogel, which is the lightest material on earth. There's a lot to be figured out and I've been designing it, but it's a vision I've had for years. And the Lyon curators found a manufacturer of this material in Lyon that I'm going to be working with.
[00:36:10] Ben: Do you have any advice for aspiring or emerging artists that might be listening to the show?
[00:36:17] WangShui: Yeah. Prioritize self care and everything else will come to you.
[00:36:25] Ben: Well WangShui thank you so much for your time it's been so great to get to know your story and chat.
[00:36:31] WangShui: Thank you, Ben.
[00:36:33] Ben: And thank you, dear listener for joining us for this week's show. If you liked what you heard and you want to help support our work and mission of equitably, compensating artists. Like I mentioned at the top, you can join us over at Patreon.com/artobsolescence or if you are interested in making a one-time tax deductible gift through our fiscal sponsor, the New York Foundation for the arts you can do so at art and obsolescence.com/donate. And there, you can also find the show notes and full transcript as well as highlights on Twitter and Instagram @artobsolescence. Have a great week my friends, my name is Ben Fino-Radin, and this has been Art and Obsolescence.