PRESS RELEASE

On the occasion of the Quartier des Bains common opening night, Mitterrand+Cramer are pleased to welcome Paris based Galerie Laurent Godin and Franco-Chinese artist Wang Du.

The gallery will show three large bronze indoor/outdoor sculptures from the series "Les Modes", six "Rockets" and one mural installation titled "Yellow Pages". It will be an occasion for the visitors to discover a portion of what makes Wang Du one of the very best contemporary sculptors.

Wang Du has been recognized as a master of manipulating images related to the mass media. He is an iconoclastic hero in re-appropriating and deconstructing the spectacular images of our contemporary society founded upon the logic of creation, consumption and manipulation of information, both textual and imagery. In his often-spectacular sculptures and installations, Wang Du turns some of the most spectacular moments propagated by the hegemonic system of mass media into ironic and absurd forms. Facing his spectacular art works, what one experiences is, indeed, the ultimate disillusion of the fictive myth of contemporary society promised by the global capitalist ruling machine.

“Wang Du is arguably one of the most relevant artists of our time. He takes on the subject of contemporary media, and shows how it increasingly invades our lives. Wang is somehow able to portray that experience in a way that truly represents the full force of information’s pervasive grip,” says René de Guzman, Visual Arts Curator for Yerba Buena Center for the Arts.

Wang Du was born in 1956 in Wahan, The People’s Republic of China. As a young boy, Wang Du created propaganda-oriented caricatures as a way to perfect his drawing skills and offer social and political critique during the Cultural Revolution. In 1986, he co-founded “The Salon of Artists of Southern China” in order to open up the spread of information and allows individuals to invest in values outside the propaganda that had plagued China the last 20 years. In 1989, Wang was involved in the Canton pro-democratic protests and was arrested and imprisoned. A year later, he was released and shortly after exiled to France during the early 1990s. Since his move to France he has been creating sculptural installations that illustrate how massively distributed information about politics, war, celebrity and sexuality are manipulated and rapidly consumed.

Wang Du’s work has been widely exhibited in solo and group exhibitions since the mid-1990s, notably as part of Hou Hanru's Cities on the Move exhibition in 1998, the Venice Biennale, and the Inside Out Chinese Art exhibition organized by the Asia Society and SFMOMA. In 2004 he exhibited Wang Du: Parade at La Criée in Rennes, Les Abattoirs in Toulouse, Le Rectangle in Lyon and Palais de Tokyo in Paris