Your name
Wizard Tang
Place of birth
Dalian, China
Place where you live now
Beijing, China
3 words to describe you
animal lover, Rock youth, environmentalist
Why do you take pictures?
I was very passionate about rock music as a teenager and I was eager to document all things rock and roll with my camera for over 10 years. There has been a shift in the last few years and I've been focusing more on my day to day life.
Where do you get your inspiration?
Fragments of daily life Music Consumer Event Experience
Who are your influences?
Cui Jian (rock musician), Xu Bing, Wang Qingsong, Martin Parr, Araki Nobuyoshi
What determines the subject matter you choose?
I feel that rock music in China has been completely replaced by entertainment, and that the spirit of rock has gradually disappeared, so I created the series ‘Blow-up 00:00’ as an irony of reality. During the special period when I couldn't go out, I began to pay attention to my daily life. China began to experience an economic downturn, young people were faced with unemployment, not wanting to fall in love, not wanting to buy a house, and the serious dilemma of ‘low desires’, and many people were nostalgic about the previous period of economic prosperity, and I began to think about my own life as well. ‘The Replicated Identical Facial Expressions’ series.
What impact would you like your art to have?
Artists should seek to alienate themselves from others, filling their minds with a desire for solitude. The artist's greatest success lies in the fact that when the viewer looks at their works, he or she simply wants to own them rather than read them. This is not necessarily a compliment to the author, but it is the greatest gift to him or her. Artists are both eager and detached from the viewer's ability to understand their work.
What artwork do you never get bored with?
Hiroshi Sugimoto’s Seascapes. This year I saw Hiroshi Sugimoto's large solo exhibition and was very shocked and impressed by his works.
Is there anything you want to add?
Recently I have been practicing works that combine photographic images with installation art, multiple materials, and that incorporate 3D printing. Already I have participated in several large scale exhibitions within China and received several awards, media coverage and recognition.

A Thousand Cuts
Project statement

“In fact, all human beings desire a simple life, even if it only comes without a great mind.”

I photographed the abandoned, old, dusty household items in the hallways of the neighborhood where I live.
My works engage with the situation of ordinary people involved in the wave of consumerism. The discarded and displaced items in the hallway offers us a glimpse of the material life of common urban dwellers in big cities during the process of commercialization, allowing us to experience their fast-changing states of life.
The images are then scanned into digital files and arranged into the deconstructed and distorted collages through the creator’s uninhibited imagination, thus adorning the obsolete everyday objects with a sense of strangeness, thrill, industrial characteristics, and fast food quality. It enlivens mundane products and dispels the tedium of the commonplace, generally demonstrating a nuanced connection of the real and the fictitious as a form of irony that challenges the realities we all take for granted.

wizard tang
@wizard.tang