The Bolsky Gallery is pleased to present WHERE I AM, a Thesis Exhibition by visual artist Runze Wang. The selection of works include watercolor on paper, projected digital painting, and video work. Wang’s exhibition open’s February 19th and lasts through the 25th.
Runze Wang’s work predominantly questions notions of duality. WHERE I AM speaks to an experience of the body being in one place, while the mind wanders to another. By creating an interior world in physical space, Wang invites an intimate encounter between her internal consciousness and external reality. She plays with internal and external, as well as the balance between memories and experience, past and present, reality and fantasy.
Wang’s experience of being trapped in a fixed space, during extended periods of quarantine, allowed for moments of uninterrupted experimentation with the digital. There, she found unlimited space where her mind once again became free to discover endless possibilities.
Wang now combines different spaces, using digital painting and animation, along with a combination of various representational painting styles. Runze questions the paradox of using representative tools in order to represent. When making virtual art, the digital brushes and textural filters imitate the mark of her own hand; thereby the representational tools enact a form of representation themselves.
The layered digital renderings express Runze’s experience of existing in multiple worlds at once. Reflecting upon the difference between memories and experience, Wang notes that both are real, and ever-present. The experience of tranquility while diving is now stored in memories that Wang chooses to re-live through her artistic creations. Merging together divergent environments, Wang break down memories and dreams, reorganizes experiences, and paints a unique world that breaks the boundary between reality and illusion.
Runze Wang (b.1994, China) is a visual artist pursuing her MFA at Otis College of Art and Design. She grew up in Northeast China and currently resides in Los Angeles, CA. She received her BFA and first MFA from Liaoning Normal University, Dalian, China.
