Exhibition View of Symbiosis (2013–24), Chaosmosis: A WANG Yuyang Exhibition at 798CUBE, Beijing, 2025.
Following Wang Yuyang: Painting (2024) at Long Museum West Bund and Chaosmosis: A WANG Yuyang Exhibition (2024) at Shenzhen Art Museum, Chaosmosis: A WANG Yuyang Exhibition presented by 798CUBE marks WANG Yuyang’s first major institutional solo exhibition in Beijing. Traversing a decade of artistic invention, the exhibition is curated by ZHANG Ga and it unfolds as both survey and metamorphosis—where sculpture, painting, and installation imbricate in shifting constellations of matter and thought. It is on view from November 9, 2025 through March 29, 2026.
Curator ZHANG Ga introduced Chaosmosis: A WANG Yuyang Exhibition to visitors at 798CUBE, Beijing, 2025.
Chaosmosis: or the Return of the Grand Narrative
By ZHANG Ga
WANG Yuyang’s oeuvre unfolds as a theatre of entanglements: machines that dream, bacteria that glow, language that reincarnates as DNA, and mud that aspires toward consciousness. His works are not merely objects but situations—turbulent interstices where the fragile membranes of life converse with the machinic abstractions of code.
From the sprawling, uncanny 2015 exhibition Tonight I Shall Meditate on That Which I Am at the Long Museum—where “that” and “I” conjugated in a speculative grammar of subject and object—to the later scenographies at OCAT Shanghai, where galleries were rendered moist with machinic reveries, to the grand narrative made anew at the Shenzhen Art Museum (2024), transgressing human histories and inviting reterritorialization, WANG has trodden a trajectory at once evolutionarily persistent —steadfast in its fascination with inconformity —and biographically disruptive, punctuated by forking paths that continually reorient his artistic imagination.
Exhibition View of Chaosmosis: A WANG Yuyang Exhibition at 798CUBE, Beijing, 2025.
If WANG Yuyang# series, a hallmark of the artist’s LONG Museum exhibition, manifested a rupture from an anthropomorphized object world to a reckoning with intelligences of another order, reversing the operational canon and delegating creative agency to the often subservient medium of tool-being, Symbiosis (2013–24) as the first piece encountered in front of 798CUBE, indicates, on the other hand, a second return of the human artist and the “utility of tool being.” Here, the strange beauty of this monumental structure is a love child between WANG Yuyang the artist in flesh and WANG Yuyang# the artist in bytes – a reconciliation of human fancy and machine vagary. The antagonism and intrigue that drive much of today’s AI hype seem to find respite in a measured posture of transience and transcendence. Nearby, a one-meter metal ball, steered by AI trained on human eye movements, rolls across the forecourt to “gaze” at visitors—an uncanny reminder that autonomy is a two-way street, where inert matter may harbor latent life.
Exhibition View of Symbiosis (2013–24), Chaosmosis: A WANG Yuyang Exhibition at 798CUBE, Beijing, 2025.
Inside the space, visitors are greeted by wiggling light tubes stochastically scattered about. Advancing the hallway, these errant signs of the sentient soon aggregate into a colony of hundreds of them, squirming, twitching, carefully delineating their proximity with neighbors, circumventing and, at the same time, attempting to coalesce. It is a machinic dance of caution and lust perhaps but not an anthropomorphic ritual. Artificial life turned life artificial.
Exhibition View of The Dubious of Entanglement by Plants (2013–24), Chaosmosis: A WANG Yuyang Exhibition at 798CUBE, Beijing, 2025.
In The Dubious of Entanglement by Plants (2013–24) the derelict impregnates a speculation about a sculpture that lives. Weeds grow thickly and what was once an immaculate artifact, is now an obscure object of desire amongst the imperceptible province of the biomolecular underworld, where bacteria abound. As structures and elements break down, fluctuate, and transpose, molecular bifurcation nurtures the birth of Biological Klein Blue (2022). The new Klein Blue is of a biological kind, to be precise, of a wonderful work of synthetic biology. The blended culture of transgenic ingredients yields a splendid blue that is very unusual in living organisms. The intensely colored pigment is so rich and lively that it is to pierce through its glass encasement and spill all over. But, certainly, it is not remotely akin to Prussian blue, the first modern synthetic pigment from which deadly cyanide had been isolated as a byproduct. Flanking the artificial life of the blue, life (Plant, 2024) flourishes in algorithmic prowess, too. In an age when semantics has acquired agential potency, to define is to code and to procreate, and it starts with the most rudimentary recipe of all life, DNA. All lives have a common ancestor, the evidence can be traced back to some 3.7 billion years ago when signs of life first emerged in biogenic matter. But here the most rudimentary has become the most intricate and elaborate: a dictionary entry for the word “fungus” is translated into ATCG, the base pairs of DNA, and then injected into a eukaryotic organism. It is assumed that future generations of the fungi will therefore be hybrids of the original fungi DNA and the human language reinterpreted DNA. Nature is bricolaged with the unnatural to become a third nature, a perfect symbiont that is much desired today. The refurbished biomass sprawls between everything as if to make its indisputable claim that fungi and humans are of the same origin (Define, 2022). All are unspeakable yet propagated and permeated by words, the code.
Exhibition View of Biological Klein Blue (2022), Chaosmosis: A WANG Yuyang Exhibition at 798CUBE, Beijing, 2025.
Exhibition View of Plant 20251102, Chaosmosis: A WANG Yuyang Exhibition at 798CUBE, Beijing, 2025.
Exhibition View of Plant 20251106, Chaosmosis: A WANG Yuyang Exhibition at 798CUBE, Beijing, 2025.
Exhibition View of of Define (2025), Chaosmosis: A WANG Yuyang Exhibition at 798CUBE, Beijing, 2025.
Life is godly (the air of the immaculate Ice Age is certainly divine), a breath blown into mud so it goes. But here, life is also words or code turned living. Golem(2022) is invoked in the title of this monumental lump of mud and its unnamable growing form and in that golem is an inanimate thing granted life by incantations and letters, the symbolism of a contemporary vision of code-engendered life is obvious. The form of the golem is a wretched portrait of artificial intelligence seeking to emulate the shape of the artist, fed by biometric datasets accrued from WANG Yuyang, albeit deranged, becoming a crystalline form of the artist’s consciousness. Climate, temperature, and environmental situations would sculpt and probably precipitate the eventual decay of the fragile clay (supposedly) humanoid figure back to dust at 798CUBE in an archeological future.
Exhibition View of Golem (2022), Chaosmosis: A WANG Yuyang Exhibition at 798CUBE, Beijing, 2025.
Enter eon, what French philosopher Quentin Meillassoux might call ancestrality, which is a world without thought: “[a] world without the givenness of the world, [but] a world capable of subsisting without being given” (Meillassoux, After the Finitude, 28), one registering geological timelessness and archaeological perpetuity. This is a new Grand Narrative in which the history of human civilizations is deprived of any privilege.
Exhibition View of Forgotten Memories (2024), Chaosmosis: A WANG Yuyang Exhibition at 798CUBE, Beijing, 2025.
There is only the undead from which life may be resuscitated. In Forgotten Memories (2024), ice cores from ancient glaciers were harvested and turned into oxygen so that the homo sapiens of the twenty-first century may savor pristine air instead of the fumes and aerosols of our time, out of a Medusa-like structure with winding pipes and tubes that stored the ancient ice, then melted and oxygenized it. Life is breathed alive by the undead and a world without the givenness of the world becomes the given world anew.
Exhibition View of Mortal Light (2021), Chaosmosis: A WANG Yuyang Exhibition at 798CUBE, Beijing, 2025.
With a window into the sky (Mortal light, 2021), the blue sky sheds an immaculate form of light into the former Soviet master-architectural work. A beautiful picture: a light ray beams in from the perfectly square opening to the “sky,” alternating effulgence with shadow in tandem with Beijing’s cartographic latitudes and altitudes. The mesmerizing ray of light resonates with the skylight toward which the Golem is rising, except it is only an illusion of the atmosphere. The (supposedly) natural light has a life span, as with the wiggling lights populating the floor. All can be seen as transitory, while all that is unseen is immortal.
This dialectic of the seen and unseen finds its cosmic corollary in the Moon. Moon is immortal but seeable—moon’s permanence is only a celestial transience but eternal in geological scale and biological measure. If the Moon Landing Program initiated to question the validity of the real, which undergirds WANG Yuyang’s skepticism about creativity and authenticity through numerous manifestations and varied incarnations over the years, the Moon has also become for the artist a beacon of conceptual device and a motif for formal inquiry. Moon is first thought, desired, achieved, yet still beyond. It’s the beyond within reach, its faded myth only inspires more hankering: in the solid light of the Artificial Moon (Long Museum, 2015), constructed from thousands of dazzling light bulbs, in the Liquid Moon (OCAT Shanghai, 2022) that shines from the underworld of the artist’s bodily membranes, a moon made up by biomass.
Artificial Moon (Long Museum, 2015)
Liquid Moon (OCAT Shanghai, 2022)
It is against this backdrop that WANG Yuyang returns to the optical illusion, albeit with the aid of technical prosthesis, to disclose the moon in a series of paintings under the auspices of the Moon Series (Moon 20251028, 2025). We encounter a colossal work measuring 12 by 2 meters, occupying the field of vision in a panoramic sweep. Wearing a black-and-white camera, the artist perceives both palette and lunar image in monochrome while painting, only for the canvas to emerge vividly colored in meticulous elaboration—estranged from our long-held perception of a colorless moon. Thus, WANG once again subverts common perception, engendering an actively real image born of false reproducibility. And just as the skylight’s transitory beam first revealed the tension between light and illusion, so too does the colored moon return us to that primal paradox—what flickers and fades becomes the very gateway to what endures unseen.
Moon is also the source of dreaming, of distance, of memory, of past and future.
Exhibition View of Moon Series (Moon 20251028, 2025), Chaosmosis: A WANG Yuyang Exhibition at 798CUBE, Beijing, 2025.
Exhibition View of Dream (2016–24), Chaosmosis: A WANG Yuyang Exhibition at 798CUBE, Beijing, 2025.
As a hardware incarnation of the wetware series of WANG Yuyang#, a telematic embrace infuses braincells with iron and steel across time zones and coalescing consciousnesses both machine and human. Inside of a sealed space with four glass walls, an industrial robotic hand agilely moves about, painting gracefully on the transparent panes, choosing colors, stroking a line, brushing a surface. It is the sleeping artist mechanically sleepwalking which makes the dream come true, albeit through the playfulness of an apparatus (Dream, 2016–24). Distance collapses and time diminishes, human made machine, machine turned human, it is the sign of the times.
Exhibition View of Indiscernable (2024), Chaosmosis: A WANG Yuyang Exhibition at 798CUBE, Beijing, 2025.
Entropy and probability come hand in hand, according to Ludwig Boltzmann and chaos precedes order as so announced by the Nobel laureate IIya Prigogine (Prigogine and Stengers, Order Out of Chaos). In Indiscernable (2024), white spots appear stochastically in a pool of black liquid, then suddenly converge into our narcissistic self-image, vanishing and reforming as yet another portrait of a random human spectator, ad infinitum. This uncanny phenomenon invokes a working model of a dissipative structure which has many implications about self-organizing systems that have grown exponentially around us today.
Exhibition View of Vortex 20240120, Chaosmosis: A WANG Yuyang Exhibition at 798CUBE, Beijing, 2025.
As if a centripetal pull from the entropy reaching a silent force field under enormous pressure, an inverted cascade of vortex-eye like holes ripple through a giant, metallically reflexive cannas (Vortex, 2024). It is a kind of new material painting WANG Yuyang and his studio have come to terms with a nascent phenomenon.
Entropy, however, is not only cosmic but microbial. Bacteria are particles too—minute alchemists of decay and renewal—suspended and crystallized in a plasma display of images drawn from moss and liverworts (I Don’t Know, 2024). In a translucent case, strange images cascade and shuffle, generated by artificial intelligence yet driven by the activity data of the very microorganisms within. As these organisms grow, their unseen rhythms surface as images—a speculative theater where biology and code conspire. The microbial world of this bio-reactor extends the germinations of Plant and Define, works that had already unsettled our imagination, and reminds us that entropy unfolds not only across galaxies but also within the smallest cells, where chance reigns unseen.
Exhibition View of Collapse (2024), Chaosmosis: A WANG Yuyang Exhibition at 798CUBE, Beijing, 2025
Collapsing is a thermodynamic norm. Everything collapses in the end, that is the irrefutable irreversibility of entropy. Destruction is the twin of construction, it’s the primary law of conservation that everything is indebted to, including us humans. But then entropy comes hand in hand with probability. We don’t know when collapsing takes place, where is the threshold in which a phase shift comes to pass, in which the transition happens, chaos emerges, and things break down. A fish tank (Collapse, 2024) is precariously equipped with a menacing metal probe, it may strike the fish tank, shattering it at any moment, or it may not in our lifetime. Chance and aleatory events are out of human control. But today, even chance can be programmed such that it becomes a controlled uncontrollability.
An empty chair, upon which WANG Yuyang once sat, recounting the story of how a robot dog furnished with solar panels for life support was set off on an uninhabited land of Lop Nur in Northwestern China. The dog walked many miles, with satellite GPS following her whereabouts. Time went by, signals became weakened, eventually the dog disappeared (Release, 2024).
Exhibition View of Release (2024), Chaosmosis: A WANG Yuyang Exhibition at 798CUBE, Beijing, 2025.
The finale is to vanish, to be released into disappearance is victory over planned obsolescence. Nothing to be seen, everything has already happened. Into oblivion marches technology, exhausted of power supply, like an organism that crumbles in breaking-down its chemical bonds and rearranges its atoms to form new compounds. Dissolution and collapse may be the prelude to a new form of being, out of chaos arises equilibrium and order. That is again the physical law, against all human inventions and interventions.
WANG Yuyang’s world is an aggregation or conglomeration of discrete elements, a violation of continuum and consistence, where aleatory encounters agitate perturbation, in which precariousness is the norm and chaos persists. It is the atomic world both of the macro large and the micro small, convoluted in multiplicities of existence like the discombobulated finding of the double-slit experiment. Michel Serres, speaking of Lucretius, portrays chaos as the primordial atomic condition (Serres, The Birth of Physics). But rather than endorsing a traditional atomist account of the chaos of fluxion, in which atoms move linearly, or fluctuation by which particles fly in all directions, he elaborates on the laminar flow by the Lucretian image of clinamen: that in the void all directions are equal, neither ups nor downs are favored. “[N]o point is privileged with respect to any other and none is univocally subordinate to any other” (Serres, Hermes I, Communication, 5). All particles move uniformly and regularly, displaying no deviation in their homogeneous motion in the laminar flow, until a fortuitous atom unexpectedly changes direction, bifurcating from the given pathway. This swerve disrupts the invariable, degenerating into turbulence, much like a gentle sea breeze escalates into a storm, a butterfly effect. Serres therefore says that turbulence is order, and order turbulence, their perpetual reciprocity rules out a universal time and space. Out of these tumultuous disorders emerge new and singular temporalities and spatialities, each subsisting in its due course of continuance before disintegrating into chaos once again. In that cyclically eternal return, there is a multitude of times and spaces, enduring and dissipating each according to its own nature and rhythm, according to Serres (Christine Wertheim).
In his final book, Guatarri coined the word chaosmosis (Guattari, Chaosmosis), unveiling the philosopher’s vision of a fluid interplay between order and disorder, a world of metamorphosis and emergence, and the intricate exchanges and turbulent currents traversing many realms and scales of existence, encapsulating the gist of his ecological philosophy. Chaosophy is Ecosophy, in which humans, societies with a technological turn, and the natural world intersect and transverse, giving rise to novel structures and new subjectivities that undermine the once Grand Narrative of human history. It is an a-signifying semiology empowered by agentic autopoiesis and outside of regime of the poststructuralist toolkit, an epiphany of the technic noumenon (Hansen, The Critique of Data). At the heyday of the deconstruction of the Grand Narrative the vision of three ecologies resonated with a new type of Grand Narrative as Serres had advocated, that which “abides by two formats, both properly universal: the laws of physics and the genetic code.” (Serres, Branches, 31) It is with this empathy and in resonance that we heed WANG Yuyang’s grand narrative of Choasmosis, and this narrative, as Guattari had unequivocally enunciated, is theirstories that unfold in an equally irreducible ethic – aesthetic paradigm. Against the obsolescence of anthropocentric history on the one hand and the AI-infused anxieties of human deprivation on the other, his works open a contemplative path forward—a grand narrative of sorts: a fluid interplay between order and disorder, between biological, machinic, and cosmic forces. Out of chaos emerges continuance; out of collapse, another beginning; out of the legacy of humanism, the burgeoning of renewed human empathy.
Originally published on WANG Yuyang: Chaosmosis（Mousse Publishing, Spring of 2025)
Notes
Hansen, Mark B. “Critique of Data.“ in Critique and the Data, edited by Erich Hörl, Nelly Y. Pinkrah, and Lotte Warnsholdt, 23 – 73. Zurich: Diaphanes,2021.
Guatarri, Felix. Chaosmosis: An Ethico–Aesthetic Paradigm. Translated by P. Bains and J. Pefanis. Sydney: Power Publications, 2006.
Guatarri, Felix. Three Ecologies. Translated by Ian Pindar and Paul Sutton. New York: Bloomsbury, 2014.
Meillassoux, Quentin. After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency. Translated by R. Brassier. New York: Continum Publishing, 2009.
Prigogine, Ilya, & Stengers, Isabelle. Order Out of Chaos: Man’s New Dialogue with Nature. London: Verso, 2017.
Serres, Michel. Branches: A Philosophy of Time, Event and Advent. Translated by R. Burks. New York: Bloomsbury, 2020.
Serres, Michel. Hermes I: Communication. Translated by Louise Burchill. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2023.
Serres, Michel.The Birth of Physics. Translated by D. Webb and W. Ross. London: Rowman & Littlefield, 2018.
Wertheim, Christine. https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/a-science-of-exceptions-on-michel-serress-the-birth-of-physics/.
About the Curator
ZHANG Ga is a curator and Distinguished Professor at the China Central Academy of Fine Arts. He co-organized and curated the Beijing International Media Art Exhibition and Symposium (2004–2006), a pioneering initiative that introduced the latest global media art practices and theorization into mainland China. From 2008 to 2014, he curated three editions of the Media Art Triennial at the National Art Museum of China (Synthetic Times, 2008; translife, 2011; thingworld, 2014). In recent years, he has curated thematic and survey exhibitions including Motion Is Action: 35 Years of Chinese Media Art (By Art Matters, 2023-2024), Topologies of the Real (MoCAUP, 2023), AI Delivered: The Abject and Redemption (Chronus Art Center / A4 Art Museum, 2022); The 6th Guangzhou Triennial (co-curator, 2018), Machines Are Not Alone (Museum of Contemporary Art Zagreb, 2018), unREAL: The Algorithmic Present (co-curator, HeK Basel, 2017), and Datumsoria: The Return of the Real (ZKM, 2017-18). In 2024, he curated monographic exhibitions of Korean artist Yunchul Kim, Chinese Artist WANG Yuyang and ZHANG Peili respectively. ZHANG has edited several books and contributed numerous catalogue essays. Under his leadership over the past decade, Chronus Art Center (CAC) has grown into a key platform in the global practice of media art.
About the Artist
Wang Yuyang is a new media artist and currently serves as a professor at the Central Academy of Fine Arts. His artistic practice centers on technological art, investigating the dynamic relationships between technology and art, nature and artifice, as well as materiality and immateriality. His work demonstrates a distinctly cross-disciplinary and transmedia creative approach.
His artistic production spans multiple domains, including artificial intelligence, genetic engineering, digital media, and mechanical installations. Through technical means such as computer programming, algorithmic generation, and data visualization, Wang creates evolving and interactive art forms.
In 2022, Wang Yuyang represented China at the 59th Venice Biennale, participating in the China Pavilion's exhibition "Meta-Scape." His works are held in the collections of numerous major institutions, including the National Art Museum of China, CAFA Art Museum, Guangdong Museum of Art, Hunan Museum, Long Museum, K11 Art Foundation, Taikang Art Museum, Power Station of Art in Shanghai, HE Art Museum, Musée d'Art Moderne de Paris, White Rabbit Gallery in Sydney, Australia, and DSL Collection.
About the Exhibition
Chaosmosis: A WANG Yuyang Exhibition
Dates: 2025.11.09-2026.03.29
Venue: 798CUBE
Courtesy of 798CUBE, edited by CAFA ART INFO.
