One Thousand and One Attempts To Be an Ocean

2022 - Film & Video (Film & Video)
11:30 minutes

One Thousand and One Attempts to Be an Ocean by Yuyan Wang reflects on the experience of not being able to see the world with depth perception. Made up of micro-events from ‘satisfying videos’ that swarm on the internet, the abstract narrative unfolds through layers of appropriation; referencing trance and minimal music in the process. The work addresses a desire for groundless waves, blended with today’s inexorable entropy of information societies. The installation version of the work is presented in a swirling space, covered with reflective material. Images proliferate in distorted reflections, delivering an aquarium-like environment. Excerpts of videos found on the internet – of the ‘oddly satisfying’ variety – are assembled in such a way that Wang creates a pure visual ASMR in which loops of sounds and images fabricate an elastic, palpable, and undulating texture.

Yuyan Wang is a filmmaker and multidisciplinary artist whose work examines images at the point of production and the atmosphere cultivated by media regimes within the attention economy. Both poetic and political, her productions underscore the diversity of the effectual matrix that exists between suspense and action. Her practice of image recycling is a kind of détournement that forms the basis of complex, immersive environments, inverting and subverting the functions and meanings of the images used. Employing montage, sound, and acceleration, she alternately creates focus from distraction, and ambiguity from clarity.

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