Voeed Chao Wang

A mixed-medium construction aims to introduce an idealized totalitarianism architecture through a range of mediums to provoke conversation to the audiences about the choice of whether striving for freedom or conditionally succumbing to the state and corporate control and commit a philosophical suicide.  

During the study in Royal College of Art, most of my works created focus on ordinary metropolis-dwellers’ incompetent and inconsequentiality, how we are manoeuvred and trained by corporates and states. I detest and criticize the power of contemporary bourgeois capitalist state, which had already spread to many socialist countries and made their scenarios even more complicated. I want to work out how the manipulation works, especially, but not limited to, through the design of architecture. 

The ultimate goal, for me, is not to seek for a solution free from such control, nor to find the pristine, intact personality of oneself free from the earthiness of this mundane world which does not exist from the very beginning. I do not look for a marxism anarchy utopia, either. Instead, I call for freedom of knowledge, freedom of knowing how our need and life is controlled by authorities, in order to, not to resist, but ultimately to yield and obey. The existence of such archive is the absolute prerequisite to ignore it. 

With this concept bared in mind, I took this chance to create this personally-unprecedented mixed-medium construction, a fusion of many forms I had developed in last two years. The complexity aims to reflect on current age, an age jammed with information. With all the options that are obviously constructed and abstracted, I want the viewer to know that their subjective selection is merely seemingly important. The amount of information also suggests the act of give up finishing reading the entire works.

I’m inspired by philosophers such as Michel Foucault, existentialists Jean Paul Sartre, Albert Camus, novelist Haruki Murakami, Jorge Louis Borges and especially Orhan Pamuk and his Museum of Innocence. 

This installation will not fall into any series or bodies of my works, at least it is the plan for now, it will keep grow and expand. It itself will be the entire body of this series. 

*Presentation of this work has been modified from its original installation to fit online viewing.