Memory and Awakening Beneath the Dome: Yuqi Wang’s Symbolic Circus World
Memoria e risveglio sotto la cupola
Il mondo simbolico e circense di Wang Yuqi

 

Born Beneath the Dome may be regarded as a distinctly ‘deceptive’ title, precisely because it opens itself to multiple interpretations. On the one hand, it may evoke the popular television series Under the Dome, adapted from Stephen King’s novel, in which a small American town is enclosed beneath a vast transparent dome, forcing its inhabitants into an involuntary struggle for survival. Another interpretation is more introspective: the dome may be understood as a wholly inward ‘world’, a secluded refuge in which one withdraws from intrusive gazes, inhabiting an intimate shelter among objects, things, and environments, entirely removed from whatever might threaten one’s safety. In either case, isolation is accompanied by a sense of abandonment and disorientation, hovering uncertainly between fiction and reality.

 

I believe that the Chinese artist Yuqi Wang seeks to draw the viewer’s attention by presenting herself as the protagonist of a world, a circus world, in which memory, allusion, and fear accumulate and are expressed through a pantomime that verges on provocation. The protagonist’s apparently indifferent gestures are set against desolate environments, often marked by the neglect of time, time being another central protagonist of the exhibition. These places, like distant memories, recall a childhood shaped by toys and games, now resurfacing with a distinct melancholy. This melancholy is perceptible even within the vividly coloured images, and in the compositions structured around enlarged details.

 

The work seems to evoke a sense of absent collectivity: empty theatres, perhaps even the theatre of life itself, or else a renewed condition of innocence rediscovered among movable toys, carousels, and trapeze performers. Beneath light and tonalities that verge on the monochromatic, their presence returns us to a time when such things could be observed and touched, while we remained held within an almost magical dimension.

 

Through her artistic practice, Wang constructs a world charged with symbols, making them part of a collective experience in which the viewer may recognise themselves. Drawing on Husserl, the philosopher Bernard Stiegler reminds us of the fundamental importance of so-called ‘retention’ in the formation of consciousness. Retention refers to that which consciousness preserves through memory during experience, including both primary and secondary retention. Yet there also exists a third form of retention, produced by media of transmission such as books, images, and songs, which externalise and preserve memory itself. This third retention may be associated with visual forms that call forth emotions stored within the human subject as constitutive elements of its being.

 

Yuqi Wang, I believe, has identified and externalised these retentions, enabling us to participate in situations that belong not only to the personal unconscious, but also to the collective unconscious.

 

Text by Angelo D’Amato