Astra Huimeng Wang: Polite Infidelity

“… then today’s society must appear post-ideological: the prevailing ideology is that of cynicism; people no longer believe in ideological truth; they do not take ideological propositions seriously. The fundamental level of ideology, however, is not of an illusion masking the real state of things but of an (unconscious) fantasy structuring our social reality itself. And at this level, we are of course far from being a post-ideological society. Cynical distance is just one way… to blind ourselves to the structural power of ideological fantasy: even if we do not take things seriously, even if we keep an ironical distance, we are still doing them.” - Slavoij Žižek ———————————————————————————————————————
Make Room is delighted to present Astra Huimeng Wang’s second solo exhibition Polite Infidelity, in Los Angeles. The exhibition title Polite Infidelity perhaps allures to our mentalities as members of a “post-ideological” society. It may seem unbecoming, even offensive, to commit fully and unironically to a single ideology or belief system. Instead, society unironically commits to the delusion that we are not witnessing the slow collapse of western empires—once powerful but now faltering. So is this what Wang is signaling towards, with the works in Polite Infidelity?

The plush vibrancy of the raw-liver-red flocked curtains in Mildly Entertaining, Keenly Felt, the gilded-age attire of the audience attending the spectacle central to the painting, the conspicuously jaunty attire of the processioners in In Time’s Ruins, and the joyful romp that concludes the funeral parade—These elements seem to offer satire on a silver platter, inviting us to reflect on our disillusionment. However, all of her works, in particular In Time’s Ruins, belie something more sincere and lacking in real “ironical distance.”

In Time’s Ruins is on one hand, a public execution of the piano in its role as a symbol of western cultural supremacy, and on the other hand, an earnest religious sacrament, a ritual sacrifice, an appeal to some unconscious fantasy for deliverance from suffering. The piano is carried, like Christ bearing the cross, into the desert for execution. Then a funeral procession, spectral and incongruous with its surroundings, journeys out from the desert through a ghost town and into the jewelry district of downtown Los Angeles, before it returns to the studio and the gallery as Damage Control, an altarpiece, painted on the lid of the original shot piano. The desert, often seen as a place of testing and revelation in Abrahamic religions, holds great symbolic significance. Neither can the fact that the funeral procession, once it reaches Los Angeles, first arrives outside an evangelical church with a sign reading “Pare de sufrir”, or “end suffering”. Whether the members of this cult-like procession are true believers or are merely indulging in collective fantasy, they seem to have found their deliverance, whether spiritual, ideological, or emotional, in the end.

The tension between ironic distance and true belief mirrors a similar tension between reality and unreality present in both the paintings and the film. For example, in Mildly Entertaining, Keenly Felt, there is a clear division between the audience loosely outlined in white, and the spectacle at center stage flocked chromatic. From across the room, the figure on the horse seems to vibrate off the painting’s surface, appearing more real than its surroundings. However, as the viewer approaches, the spell is broken, and the figure on the horse dissolves like a weathered relief on an old stone wall. At arm’s distance, only the audience members remain truthful about the fidelity with which they were rendered. In this way, Wang separates the painting into two spaces, encouraging viewers to navigate the boundary between reality and fantasy.

Wang achieves a similar contrast in In Time’s Ruins through the inclusion of her lonely acolyte, the piano mover. The film is bookended by sequences showing the piano mover hoisting the piano onto a trailer. If the piano is a ghost on its palanquin, then in its trailer it’s a corpse. The contrast between the measured, stoic walk of the pall-bearers and the conspicuous effort with which the piano mover works, again underscores a division between the real and the fantasy.
Only The Night is like a Strange Day resolves this division between realms. Unlike the other paintings, this work was meticulously hand-carved into the lacquer of the piano lid. Without the obvious presence of society, humanity, and its ruins as in Thank You for Coming Home, or the dissonant coincidence of fantasy, this work is suspended in a third supercritical state. Reality becomes slippery, untethered from the unconscious fantasies that structure it. Starry leaves and quicksilver seas, the Picardy third at the end of the overture to the decomposition of fantasies—all in all Mildly Entertaining, Keenly Felt.