01.21.—02.27.2022

Tintinnabulations

WANG Chen

Scuplture2. 2021. Video loop, clay, acrylic paint and pen. 20 x 19.5 x 9”.

Opening January 21, Lauren Powell Projects is excited to present Tintinnabulations, a solo exhibition by WANG Chen. Featuring the video installations In The Woods (2021) and The Sin Park (2019) alongside new mixed-media sculptures, handmade costumes, and drawings, this will be the artist’s first solo exhibition in Los Angeles.

WANG Chen’s alternate reality environments explore myth, imagination, and identity in physical and virtual realms. In this exhibition, layered rhythms from audiovisual works resound with posed woven costumes and altar-like sculptures mounted in the wall. These avatars and portals are not fixed but radically open, with pixels swimming on screens between painted ceramics and strands of yarn cascading across faces and bodies, glitching here and there.

For the large-scale video installation In The Woods, Chen’s intensive process of augmenting drawing and painting with digital elements has reached new depths. A creature appears alone in the woods, standing still while the world around them wiggles and swirls. Crouching over a liquid surface, they witness multiplied reflections that give way to fuzzy universes seen through blinking eyes. Costumed performances recorded in front of a green screen initiate the creative process for this surreal and vivid environments. The artist then develops stop-motion animation sequences and a system of translating hand-painted forms, colors, and textures into the virtual skin of the video using the 3D rendering software Unity.

The videos become roving journeys at the intersections of video game, music video, and performance art, with a dash of ritual, magic, and mystery. Floating percussionists, twinkling bells, and variegated plants and creatures perform for an audience along for the ride. The earlier video The Sin Park was crafted in a similar process, with painting, costume, video and sound simultaneously developed and intertwined.

‘Tintinnabulation’ is a noun that refers to the merry and melodious “jingling and tinkling” sounds, and was first used in English in Edgar Allen Poe’s poem The Bells. Contrasting the twinkle of silver bells with the solemnly tolling “melancholy menace” of iron bells and the jangling and wrangling of brazen bells, Poe’s poem, like Chen’s work, is a passage across a multiplicity of registers.

Beyond photo or video documentation of Tintinnabulations, a flickering in the ears may be your only evidence for having embarked on this trip. Chen’s work is hypnotic and hallucinatory, traversing vast sonic and visual palettes with sculpture, sound, video, performance, and painting. While our visually-dominant world downplays acoustic phenomena and increasingly accelerates into the metaverse, Chen grounds their guided quests with sound and hand-wrought fabulation. Expression, transformation, and transportation abound in fantastical and portentous new worlds.