Chinese Name: 王鼎曄
Born: 1978
Place of Birth: Taipei
Did You Know?
Wang Ding-yeh graduated from the National Taiwan University of Arts in 2003, earned his master's degree from the Dresden Academy of Fine Arts (Hochschule für Bildende Künste Dresden) in Germany in 2011, and currently serves as an associate professor in the Department of Fine Arts at the Chinese Culture University.
Wang Ding-yeh excels at creating art with video installations, painting, and new media installations, revolving around themes of personal, societal, and historical memory. He firmly believes that through creativity, he can connect or confront with external society while also healing himself. His recent works contemplate collaborations with different families, reorganizing their own histories, initiating new collective memories and dialogues, and reconstructing various aspects of grand history from micro-histories of different families. His works have been exhibited in countries including Taiwan, the United States, Israel, France, Germany, Japan, South Korea, and Malaysia.
In 2012, Wang Ding-yeh's video work, "The City in the Sky (天空之城)," was selected for the National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts Digital Art Creation project. The piece uses environmental concerns as a starting point, humorously satirizing modern industrial society. He believes that "reality" always presents life's unavoidable harshness, leading people to produce fantasies to add a touch of beauty. He imagines clouds in the sky bringing many beautiful fantasies to people, poetic and romantic. Taking clouds as his inspiration, and "imagination" and "reality" as the two contrasting states of his creative axis, Wang gives the audience a beautiful imagining of a "city in the sky," but in the end, reality shatters this beautiful imagining.
In his 2013 exhibition "Live Live Seafood (生猛海產店)," Wang collaborated with another artist, Chang Hao-hsin (張顥馨), to incorporate biotechnology into their works. They used electric conduction and musical rhythms to make the live seafood in the refrigerator produce corresponding reflex actions, performing a peculiar dance of the lifeless. Furthermore, they connected the unique local culture of Taiwan's KTVs and seafood shops, allowing biotechnology to break free from its original context and find its roots in their culture.
In 2014, Wang's work, "Portrait under Electric Shock (電擊肖像)," used the phenomenon of facial spasms caused by the pain of electric shocks to represent the collective state of society. The numbness and subsequent pain, the electric current shuttling through the face, stimulating and constricting every inch of nerves and muscles, the wrinkled and twisted face, all perform the twitching and spasmodic state of the era. The artist made use of flat images and video installations, allowing people to fully perceive their changes through their instantaneous expressions and the artwork’s experimental nature.
The 2017 solo exhibition "Confronting Memories (勇為)" is one of Wang Ding-yeh's series of works based on his family history. He uses his own family as the narrative text of the work. In the process of collecting this text, he invited his family’s elders to write fragmentary memories, which reconstructed this family's collective memory and created a new shared discourse. Through this exhibition, subtle changes also took place in the relationships between family members.
In the 2022 exhibition "Monologue from Dust 'A Flying Stone and a Floating Poem' (唸塵〈一顆飛行的石頭與一首漂浮的詩〉)," Wang Ding-yeh continued to explore his family story in the context of larger historical times, looking back at his own family, and extending from his grandfather’s life story to express his personal feelings about history. The exhibition included nine works such as installations and videos. Wang’s grandfather was a victim of the White Terror, and faced with the feelings and memories of this history, the artist pieced together and searched for keywords from his body and memory, attempting to reinterpret and explain from the perspectives of different generations across time and space.
Wang Ding-yeh believes that history should not only be the history in textbooks. What is presented through the common people's lives is the true history. He started by returning to his family, reconstructing the relationship and concept of "home." When it is pieced together bit by bit, it naturally forms the atmosphere of that era, and at this time, the same life experiences will be summoned, opening up the re-dialogue of memory, which is what the artist has tried to do through his artworks.
(Photo courtesy of Wang Ding-yeh)