"Unfinished Summer Fantasy" Painting

Ziping Wang is an artist living and working in New York City. She received her bachelor degree from Rhode Island School of Design in 2017, and just finished her master degree in Pratt Institute. She was honor student of Rhode Island School of Design in 2016, and graduate with distinction from Pratt Institute. Her works and solo exhibitions have been featured in Artnet and Create! Magazine.

Artist statement: As a painter, I’m interested in the elusive nature of modified reality. I use my paintings to document these modifications. In technologically advanced societies, our experiences of the world are under constant invasion from brightly colored advertisements, pop up window browsers and catchy slogans, all designed to be distracting. The constant overload of information generates anxiety, which is further enhanced by the ambiguity between the reality and the world these information aim to construct, especially through highly personalized curation. Unashamedly ubiquitous, this intangible algorithm-based curation is capable of producing a constructed reality so uncannily similar to our own, to tell the difference requires a constant upkeep of skepticism. The act of modification functions like a field of action where the traces of editing are grotesquely present, and the before and after images are intriguingly intertwined together. By documenting the editing process through the use of digitally manipulated imagery, and revealing and concealing different planes of images and pop culture symbols, I capture the anxiety and emotional exhaustion that result from the information overload and my skepticism towards constructed reality.