FRANK WANG YEFENG
The Levitating Perils
Frank Wang Yefeng is a multi-talented interdisciplinary artist that continues to wow us with his incredible aptitude for viewer engagement and the ability to bring a fresh way of addressing important issues of the times. Ever since a fortuitous NYC meeting on the eve of the pandemic lockdown, through a joint exhibition with artist Snow Yunxue Fu, we have been honored to feature his experimental 3D animations through our festival, and most recently a commission for Supernova Regeneration’s Night Lights Denver projection project, presented throughout September 2021 on the Daniels and Fisher Tower in downtown Denver. We knew at the time that we wanted to share a more in-depth discourse on the meaning behind this piece, and to direct our viewers towards its exciting evolution. NYC based writer Luke Hampton presents a new essay on this bold 3D experimental animation, the spark for a more expansive, fascinating body of work by Wang Yefeng that responds to the returning surge in hate against Asian communities. It is one of the most searing and potent cultural testaments yet, from this highly versatile artist, whom we are thrilled to have serving as one of our 3 jurors this September for Supernova 7th Dimension’s competition program.
The Taxonomy of Frank Wang Yefeng
By Luke Hampton
What are we looking at when we look at the creatures of Frank Wang Yefeng? Reviewing his commissioned work, The Levitating Perils, gave me the excuse and pleasure to catching up with Frank, as we have done from time to time, and taking a deep dive into his body of work extending back over the last several years and archived online through his artist website, digital catalogs, interviews, and social media. Despite the intentional cartoonish and at times irreverent aesthetics of his 3D digital animations, what is underneath Frank’s work is an astute deconstruction of the current and historic situatedness of the East Asian diasporic experience, particularly that of Chinese in America. From this deconstruction, and beyond his immediate imagery, through his artist talks, writings, and interviews, he constructs a broader metaphor, one with the utility to articulate his far-reaching investigative concepts and his ever-evolving and lived philosophy of the global nomad.
For anyone familiar with social justice discourse on Chinese American histories, the spliced iconography that gives body to and animates the creature in The Levitating Perils is recognized as pieces of western stereotypes and symbols of Yellow Perilism, most often immortalized in turn-of-the-19th-century political propaganda illustrations representing western fears of an East Asian “other” who threatens to upheave the majority’s economic and moral homogeneity. The most visually apparent features of Frank’s creature are a bust depicting devil’s horns and yellowface, attached atop an octopus whose eight tentacles morph into the gaping mouths of imperial golden dragons. This creature is an iteration of the central figure in Frank’s Yellow Peril series, a group of works made between 2021 and 2022 in response to a resurgence of Asian American hate crimes and a personal deconstruction of normative and imposed categories of racial and ethnic identity in America.
The imagery of this singular creature offers plenty to discuss on the topics it represents, yet is only one of several created beings in Frank’s body of work. For example, the rooster in BIRDS Volume II - Slow Spectre (2021) and the lesser creatures in his The Whimsical Characters (2021-Cont.). When examined together, as if a taxonomy by their biological traits, these creatures appear as manifestations of a spectrum of feelings, longings, and alienations experienced by those who find themselves in liminal social, cultural, and geographic spaces. Ecologically, they are technologically bound as virtual beings, exhibiting features and behavior defined by their environment; the whimsical characters reach out and weep longingly to connect with the viewer, the rooster waves forlornly in a dimly lit space, and the yellow peril creature levitates ambivalently as if awaiting a different identity. In each of these works, these manifestations exist in a realm of their own, always peering outward from their place of confinement and place of origin. As conceptual frameworks, however, their ecological functionality extends far beyond the virtual, as invitations to explore their realm and Frank’s deeper ethos.
Over the last several years, Frank has built a broader metaphor and cartography of this realm. Borrowing from philosophers and thinkers, like Vilém Flusser and Yuk Hui, who write on subjects of identity, individuation, and community related to technology, Frank describes this realm as the “in-between” and the persons who traverse in or through this realm—by circumstance, by force, or by choice—are the “in-betweener.”(1) Over time, Frank has probed this metaphor from varied angles, trying on different trains of thought as he reflects on the experiences and vantage points of the marginalized and displaced. In his long-term discourse, the in-between is simultaneously a physical space, an experience, a lived philosophy, a state of being. It is the realm of those who find themselves in between categories of the norm. The in-betweener is all who find themselves in the in-between and who embody the spectrum of physical and existential experiences within. The in-betweener is simultaneously an individual and a collective, superior and inferior, transient and fixed, traumatized and empowered, advantaged and disadvantaged, content and full of longing, impotent and world changing. Regardless of how one arrives in the in-between, it is an unexpected space for deconstruction, investigating the categories and communities the in-betweener is alienated from and an opportunity for the in-betweener to choose.
This reflective existential activity seems to generate manifestations. For Frank, it is roosters, whimsical creatures, and chimeras. If the experiences of the in-betweener are embodied in these manifestations, the creatures then are not the in-betweener. This means that the creatures can be deconstructed and deciphered as symbols that help make sense of the realm they inhabit. Through their examination, they can teach those willing to learn. For the uninitiated, these creatures gesture in humorous overtones, with cartoonish features and exaggerated proportions, yet they speak and teach of ineffably difficult experiences too important not to bring to the public stage. Humor aids in the teaching where there are no words or the space to share them freely. In this, there is a poignant empathy and courage that Frank exhibits through the philosophy of his art and discourse, empathy for those in-between and those in the majority and courage to vulnerably portray the experience of the displaced and the marginalized. The Yellow Peril series asks, “Yellow to whom and peril to whom?”(2) There is a particular audience in mind, but that audience too is welcomed into a dialogue.
These simultaneities reflect the constant state of flux that makes up the in-between. Those in it, by necessity, have come to reject categorization, yet borrow and learn from all categories in a constant state of becoming.(3) Frank’s personal journey takes him farther still where the in-betweener transcends categorizations, beyond “immigrant” or “marginalized,” towards the lived philosophy of the glomad, spurred on by modern technology, where no physical location is home, yet all places are home.(4) When we look at Frank(enstein)’s creatures, we see a common vulnerability, an entry point into the in-between and a change in trajectory from unexamined or imposed categorization, towards a worldview where we see in what ways we are responsible for our own trajectory and in finding community, as Frank has said, our commonalities are discovered and our differences are celebrated.(5)
Hampton, Luke. Unpublished interview with Frank Wang Yefeng. Personal, July 14, 2022.
Frank Wang Yefeng, “The Levitating Perils,” Wang Yefeng, 2022, https://www.wangyefeng.com/secret-webpage-yellow-peril.
Hampton, Luke. Unpublished interview with Frank Wang Yefeng. Personal, July 14, 2022.
Ibid.
Ibid.