Fangyang: misspelling

In Fang Yang’s series of wall-based installations, a tactile, readily malleable stone-dust clay is tightly coupled with chemically treated galvanized-steel frames. Transfer prints on the clay’s surface range from snapshots of club dance floors to CG-generated fragments and film stills. Together they point to a pervasive, everyday form of indirect violence—one that lurks in networks and media, in interface language, prompts, wayfinding symbols, and a pixelated gaze. The clay is arrayed as grids, and working through the grid is his method: to break down elusive social rules into countable pixels; to translate invisible order into modular parts that can be disassembled and reprogrammed—as if struggling to spell a language riddled with “errors.” In works such as Roast Suckling Pig, a Delicacy — You Died and Leap to Live, Leap to Die, Leap into the Whirlpool — You Mustn’t Run Away, text functions like game commands or codes of judgment; even across the screen, viewers find themselves marshaled by unseen rules. CG animation elements suffuse the work—not to conjure fantasy, but to digitally reconstruct memory: “How is it sensed within today’s media sensorium?” In The Vermin from the Gutter Keep Crawling onto Me, the artist, through a subjectively controlled manipulation of CG characters and scenes, dissects a chaotic inner world. Whether the “eerie magenta sky” after a steel-mill explosion, the “afterimage” left by his father’s truck, or the “ghostly phantoms” quietly surfacing in an industrial furnace—these core visuals draw on recollection and are presented as digital renderings of trauma, with scars reopened in a strangely lucid way. Deeply influenced by cult cinema and tokusatsu (special-effects live action), the artist points to a key contemporary condition: personal memory has become inseparable from mediated memory. This condition is further embodied as a march within an online carnival: the architecture and solution-logics of game levels inform the artist’s compositional approach to moving image. The “Flowing Quintet” of moving-image works—The Brotherhood Clinic Is Closed, Graveyard Office Hours, Thugs on the Moon, Climb Up There, and Charge! Charge! Charge, Baby!—all gesture toward this carnivalesque elsewhere, while exposing the fatigue that undergirds digital media itself: in the end, the “carnival” is a spectacle of agitation, unease, and hollowness.