A girl stands majestically on a rocky, icy precipice; she seems to be out at an unlimited frosty tract, lined in thick, flawless snow. Her again is turned to us, the temper is contemplative. She surveys her area, straight-backed, black hair licking the again of her neck.
It’s {a photograph} by the UK-based Chinese language artist Yan Wang Preston. However there’s one other model of this picture, a well-known Romantic portray by the German artist Caspar David Friedrich. It’s titled Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog, made circa 1817. In that work, a clothed, flame-haired male Rückenfigur (an individual seen from behind) stands on a jagged ridge and gazes out over a foggy panorama; the portray is the epitome of nineteenth century liberalism and romanticism, the lone determine within the rugged panorama considering his place on this planet.
This was the period of the good expeditionists, colonialism and territory-marking and it’s unattainable to see the portray now and never really feel a way of the determine’s entitlement over the land beneath.
Wang Preston’s subversive transforming of Friedrich proposes a unique relationship with the land. It hangs within the window of Messums gallery in London, an entry level to her exhibition Three Simpler Items. In her model of the picture, the determine (the artist herself) is bare – buttocks uncovered to the freezing temperatures of the South Pennines, the place the {photograph} was made. Wang Preston stood there for so long as she may deal with (10 minutes).
Half portrait, half witness to this solitary durational efficiency (which will likely be repeated, with different folks, all through the remainder of the 12 months) the uncooked discomfort Wang Preston felt in standing bare in snow, she has mentioned, is akin to what she experiences as a Chinese language girl encountering the exoticised feminine nudes in canonical western work. Slightly than the promise of domination, Wang Preston’s nude wanderer presents endurance and symbiosis with the land. Following the trajectory of ecofeminists, Wang Preston frames her “unique” physique within the panorama to level to the way in which each have been degraded and dominated by the male gaze.
Intelligent and concise reversals of artwork historical past proceed contained in the exhibition, the place Wang Preston does quite a bit in a number of massive, lush photographic reconstructions. There’s a supersize homage to Zhang Huan’s 1995 work To Add One Metre to an Nameless Mountain, during which 10 younger Chinese language artists lay bare on prime of one another in protest. Wang Preston restaged the work in Lancashire in August 2021 – after a 12 months of lockdowns – with native volunteers of all backgrounds. Getting bare in nature collectively was an act of liberation and solidarity; Wang Preston’s restaging reads as a celebration of variety and a critique of British society and the our bodies it excludes.
In three superb restagings of Manet’s Olympia, Wang Preston poses nude once more as Manet’s mannequin Victorine Meurent enjoying Olympia, then as Laure, the Black maid who attends her, switching roles with a white male mannequin – solely when Wang Preston inhabits the function of Laure, she doesn’t gaze lovingly at Olympia, however stares again on the digicam. Introduced in competition with each other, the consequences of nudity, pose and gaze play with the facility dynamics implied within the authentic picture. A 3rd model omits the figures an ellipsis that permits us to grasp how the staging and particulars of this work play into this painterly superb of modernity that equates the our bodies of prostitutes and enslaved folks with the luxurious, unique flowers and materials that encompass them.
Wang Preston has restyled Manet’s bouquets in line with Chinese language floral traditions to disclose a connection between the historical past of the peony (the star of Manet’s bouquet, a sought-after and costly flower within the nineteenth century) and slavery. The primary tree peony was imported from China to Britain in 1789 – shortly earlier than the breadfruit was exported to Jamaica from Tahiti to feed enslaved sugar planation employees. Each tasks had been managed by the English botanist Joseph Banks – who sourced many of the crops for Kew Gardens.
Preston’s earlier works have handled the complexities of migration via the literal entanglement of roots – crops which are thought-about “non-native” however that flourish regardless of their new situations, and with how colonialism was concerned with categorising vegetation, deciding what was “wild” or “weed” as a part of a challenge of domination and management. But crops, like our bodies, don’t at all times obey – they turn into entwined in pure ecologies, they create hybrids and bloom.
This new physique of works is a extra direct, confrontational and daring take a look at this relationship between the land and our bodies. Utilizing images to reconstruct iconic work has been performed earlier than – however Wang Preston does it with precision, confidence and readability. This exhibition can also be a couple of girl standing her floor, in opposition to the weather, within the face of an surroundings that’s usually hostile in direction of her physique. But when historical past is made in photographs – it may be remade in photographs, too.
