Penghua Wang

The project, I Walk Through The Forest, extends my ongoing exploration of the boundaries of images, mediums, as well as spatiality and materiality of the photographic image in my previous work, The Nameless Boundary. In addition, it also develops and unfolds as a scrupulous observation on the relationship between nature and city, reality and fiction, and experience and memory. 

We live in an image-based environment. Like a massive cage of information, we are constantly experiencing the conflict made between the gigantic image-perception needs and fragmented information intake, and as a consequence, it inevitably restricts our thinking.

In the case of Covid, the distance between people, to the greatest extent, changed from physical range to a digital and unmeasurable gap. There has been an enormous shift in the way people connect and communicate. The transformation from offline to online confused the sense of distance, the distance between man and man, and the gap between people and the screen.

All sessions and exhibitions went online during the quarantine. Whenever I opened an image, I found a browsing page frame around the picture, which triggered me to think about the border of a photo on the screen and the information-carrying capacity of an image. This kind of two-dimensional digital frame does not exist in the real world. However, it becomes a part of the digital image, hardly erased. I tried to challenge the relationship between the frame and the picture inside. I printed and cut out the frame and brought it to reality. The frame, thus, produced the progress from 2D to 3D and then back to 2D again. And continuously, the work leads my reflection on the materiality and boundary of the image.