The artist’s films are as much like a thought experiment as a wakeup call to a world we’re already living in
On the ground floor of Emalin’s Clerk’s House gallery is the two-minute video installation Mourning Sun (2024–26) by Chinese artist Yuyan Wang. Occupying one narrow wall is a backlit screen, on which are crawling shadows of winged insects, as if they were trapped just behind. Some are lifesize; others larger than life, seemingly magnified when lured close to the light source. Recalling gnats and moths swarming around a streetlight or inside a lampshade, drawn to the artificial glow until they perish, the work sets the scene for an exhibition that circles around our own hurtling towards destruction.
Over her decade-long career, Wang has worked with found footage she’s gleaned from the internet, which she edits into poetic montages that give the fleeting internet reels affective weight. Her first solo exhibition in the UK, spanning the Clerk’s House and the crypt of nearby Shoreditch Church features a total of three works. Upstairs from the winged creatures, the 15-minute Look On the Bright Side (2023) is a sequence mixing clips of mining sites found online and footage she shot inside an LED-screen factory: hand torches panning caves, minerals glimmering under UV lights, followed by LED screens being assembled and factory staff napping at work – apparently tracing the industry’s extractivist footprint. The prevailing sentiment is one of techno-pessimism, but sprinkled with a strange beauty – hovering drones morph into murmuring insects; circuit boards echo cityscapes; minerals mined in darkness made to emit light – as if a commentary on how a fable of progress often glosses over its potential moral dangers relating to extraction and labour rights.
At the Shoreditch Church, Wang’s Boring Billion (2026) offers a similar montage. The work begins with maintenance footage of ageing mining sites before shifting to clips of more recent mechanical inventions. The result is a phantasmagoric collage of the evolving techno-capitalist world from the incredible to the disturbing and ridiculous: silicone faces freshly off the 3D printer; a robot stumbling into a glass window; biomorphic fixtures pulsating as if breathing, another wriggling and slithering like worms. In the soundtrack is DeBarge’s 1982 song All This Love: “You told me to take this chance and learn the ways of love”, as another robot opens its newly installed eyes. Beyond the apparent uncanny-valley effect of painted visages starting to blink and twitch, there’s something more eerie about how lifelike they do seem, and the capacity they do have for arousing compassion and affection, as well as disgust and fear.
Wang skilfully plays with our ability to identify and feel for the mechanical beings, but it’s unclear whether the artist is making a case for empathy. With its title citing the ‘boring’ geological period when complex organisms had yet to emerge, the work seems to suggest a turning point at which another set of new life-forms is about to appear, yet the way the film is edited recalls humanity’s collective flashback towards its extinction. By the end of the film, a bright blue butterfly robot flaps its wings in the lab; a white robot ‘gull’ glides across the sky, at which point it feels as though the entirety of organic lives has been replaced by artificial ones – though as found footage, all of this is a reality in progress. Are we able to ‘learn the ways of love’ for this new world of machines? Will the machines learn to love us? To these questions Wang’s film feels as much like a thought experiment as a wakeup call to a world we’re already living in.
Yuyan Wang, Pilgrims at Emalin, London, 9 October – 14 November
