Wang Yahui: Voyager

A hand holds a leaf up to the camera. Dozens of small holes pierce its surface. Beyond it lies a broad orange field, a line of vegetation and a distant row of buildings.

The photograph belongs to Leaf Holes, a 2011 work by Wang Yahui. There are six prints in the set. In discussing it, Wang recalled collecting mulberry leaves for silkworms as a child and entering the courtyard of an abandoned factory. The leaf is close enough to touch. The cleared ground continues behind it.

Wang Yahui: Voyager opens at Taipei Fine Arts Museum on September 12. Curated by Lei Yi-ting and Hsuan-chun Lin, the retrospective brings together more than twenty years of Wang's video, photography, kinetic objects, notebooks, sketches and documentary material. Wang died in 2023. Her private records will be shown beside the finished works.

Reading and writing ran beside image-making in Wang's practice and sometimes crossed it. An image could arrive before she could say what it was doing.

For Questions to Shadow #2, Wang worked with ink on paper, artificial light and a camera. She painted the paper, lit it and looked at the resulting space through the lens. When the photograph failed, she returned to the paper and changed it again. In an interview with TFAM, she estimated that one attempt in ten might produce a usable result.

The photograph is black and white. Branches enter from above and from one side. Dark planes interrupt a pale field. In the finished image, paper, object, shadow and room are difficult to separate.

Sunshine on Tranquility shows a white room with a potted tree. It is a four-minute-and-thirty-six-second video installation. TFAM describes digital manipulation that slowly changes the boundary between light and space; the museum's still shows the room before that movement can be seen.

Notebook is a silent, nine-minute-and-one-second single-channel video. In the museum image, a ruled-paper field is projected inside a dark room. Lines, pale planes and an architectural shape appear across it.

The retrospective will also display Wang's private notebooks and sketches. Those pages are working records. The artwork named Notebook is the nine-minute video.

Two square wooden objects hang on the wall. TFAM's Chinese page calls the work 《棋盤》; its English page uses Checkerboard #2. Each square holds a small grid and clock movement near its center. The objects are made from stained wood, black acrylic and ink.