About This Project

Wizard Tang

“In fact, all human beings desire a simple life, even if it only comes without a great mind.” I photographed the abandoned, old, dusty household items in the hallways of the neighborhood where I live. My works engage with the situation of ordinary people involved in the wave of consumerism. The discarded and displaced items in the hallway offers us a glimpse of the material life of common urban dwellers in big cities during the process of commercialization, allowing us to experience their fast-changing states of life. The clutter that spills out from private spaces of individual households into the public hallway serves as a poignant metaphor, evoking images of “dried fish” stranded on the beach of desire when the great tide is on the ebb, mirroring the rapidly growing desire of consumption in this era. These remnants of desire, after a brief moment of fulfillment, overflow, and revelry, become a norm of enduring insatiability. The images are then scanned into digital files and arranged into the deconstructive and distorted collages through the creator’s uninhibited imagination, thus adorning the obsolete everyday objects with a sense of strangeness, thrill, industrial characteristics, and fast food quality. It enlivens mundane products and dispels the tedium of the commonplace, generally demonstrating a nuanced connection of the real and the fictitious as a form of irony that challenges the realities we all take for granted.

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