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| Wang Du |
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For L.F.D.A. 02.Wang Du’s work, presented at La Force de l’Art 02, was created in August 2008 for his first solo exhibition in his native China since leaving the country in 1990 to settle in Paris. International Kebab is an installation taking the form of a paper tower rising to a height of nine metres, evoking – as the name suggests – a gigantic kebab. But here, in place of the familiar slices of meat, gently roasting on the upright spit of so many Turkish or Greek restaurants, the artist has substituted pictures. Over a period of several weeks, Wang Du travelled throughout China, camera in hand, capturing thousands of images of the everyday existence of Chinese people, and the impersonal backdrops to their lives. These were then printed and enlarged to poster size, divided into lots and placed on a large turntable, pierced and superimposed one over the other, like pieces of meat on a kebab. This mega-image, created using tens of thousands of individual images, evokes the carved-up, devoured “body” of China itself, transformed into a vast fast-food operation, and the multiple social classes and categories of every kind now proliferating in a country experiencing change at a truly dizzying pace. Visitors are invited to climb the scaffolding constructed around the International Kebab, to cut off pieces of the pictures, with the knives provided. Wang DuThe work of Wang Du attempts to reveal the sophisticated deformations that the media applies to reality. In his sculptures and oversized installations, the artist fragments and stages imagery from the media's reality, its advertising content or propaganda, that he splits up and enlarges, deforming it in his own turn. By stopping the continual flow of these images that is captured by the spectator at the same time that it escapes him, the artist succeeds in demystifying them, by robbing them of a part of their power. Wang Du’s exhibitions are all conceived as places where the public is physically integrated into them, invited to see up close this world of media that it is used to observing at a distance. [V. Th.] LA FORCE DE L’ART 02 presents a gigantic work by Wang Du, International Kebab, an installation made from thousands of photographs taken by the artist, an image archive of the world, piled up, put into movement and offered to visitors for their consumption. Wang Du was born in China in 1956.
 Wang Du |
