Approach 切入丨混成：或宏大叙事的复归

通往“天空”的窗户，一道洁净的光束倾泻入这座前苏联遗存的宏大空间。方正的天窗精准地切割出光的矩形，随北京的纬度与高度而变换光影。迷人的光线与《勾勒姆》欲仰望的天光彼此呼应，然而此处的“大气”也只是幻象。这“自然之光”同样有其寿命，正如地面上扭动的光管。一切可见的都属瞬息，而不可见的才显永恒。

王郁洋，《再造登月(之四)》，金属外壳、液晶屏幕、高清播放器，110 x 15 x 45 cm, 1"18'，2007。

这种“可见与不可见”的辩证，在“月亮”那里找到了宇宙的对应。月亮看似不朽却可见——它的恒久在星际的尺度上只是暂时，但在生命的度量上却是永恒。如果说王郁洋早期的“阿波罗登月计划“曾质疑“真实”的有效性，这也是贯穿于王郁洋诸多创作变体的对于创造力与真实性的怀疑。月亮已然是艺术家的观念标记，也是美学的工具。月亮最初被想象、被渴望、被抵达，却依然远不可及；它那褪色的神话只会激发更深沉的希冀：在《人造月》（龙美术馆，2015），由数千颗灯泡构建出令人炫目的实心光球中；在《液体月亮》（上海 OCAT，2022），由来自艺术家身体膜层的幽冥之所——生物量（biomass）与神话相融的月亮之体中可见一斑。在这里，王郁洋再次转向“光学幻象”，借助技术的义肢，在《月》系列绘画中揭示另一种月之图景。

王郁洋，《人造月》，“今夜我为何物”，展览现场，龙美术馆，2015。

王郁洋，《液体月亮》，“液体的月亮，长在墙上的汽车，以及介于两者之间的其他一切”，展览现场，OCAT，2022。

一幅长达十二米、高两米的巨型画布，以全景的方式占据观者视野。艺术家佩戴黑白摄像机作画，只能以单色来感知调色盘与月球形象，然而画布最终却呈现出色彩斑斓、精致细腻的面貌——与我们长久以来关于“无色月亮”的认知相去甚远。王郁洋再次颠覆常识，以“虚假的再造”给出“真实的图像”。正如天窗那道瞬逝的光束揭示了光与幻象之间的张力，彩色的月亮也将我们带回到那原初的悖论——在闪烁与消逝之间，通往永恒之未见。

月亮亦召唤着梦境、距离与记忆。

终局即是消逝。被释放进入消失，是对计划性报废的胜利。已无可见之物，一切已然发生。技术走向遗忘，在能量耗尽之时步入湮灭，如同有机体在化学键断裂后崩解，将原子重新组合为新的化合物。解体与坍塌或许是另一种存在形态的前奏——在混沌之中涌现新的平衡与秩序。这依旧是物理法则，超越所有人类的发明与干预。

王郁洋的世界，是由离散元素聚合而成的世界，是对连续性与一致性的破坏。在这里，偶然的相遇引发扰动，不确定性成为常态，混沌始终在场。这是原子世界的宏观之大和微观之小的并峙，如同双缝实验所揭示的扑朔迷离一般，层叠交错于多重的存在之中。法国哲学家米歇尔·塞尔在论及古罗马哲人卢克莱修时，将混沌描绘为原初的原子状态（塞尔，《物理学的诞生》）。但他并未停留在传统原子论关于“流变混沌”的叙述——其中原子沿直线运动，或在各个方向上四散——而是借助“层流”的意象，提出“偏斜”（clinamen）：在虚空中，一切方向皆等价，没有上与下、没有主与从。 “[任]何一点都不优先于另一点，任何一点都不单一地服从于另一点”（塞尔，《赫耳墨斯 I：传播》）。所有的粒子均匀而规则地运动，显示出无偏差的齐整流动，直到某个偶然的原子忽然偏转，脱离既定轨迹。这一偏斜打破不变，转化为湍流，如同和煦的微风骤然升级为风暴，蝴蝶效应由此而生。塞尔因而断言：湍流即秩序，秩序即湍流。两者的永恒互为，使得普遍时间与空间失效。在这永恒的循环中，新的时间与空间不断生成与消散，各自延续自身的节律与本性，最终再次回归混沌。

在他晚年的著作中，法国哲学家瓜塔里提出了“浑宇-渗”（chaosmosis）这一用语，揭示出一种秩序与无序之间的流动交互——世界在其中不断蜕变与涌现，存在的诸多领域与层次之间发生错综复杂的交换与湍流，浓缩了他生态哲学的要旨。混沌哲学即生态哲学（Chaosophy is Ecosophy）：在这里，人类、社会与技术的转向，以及自然世界彼此交汇与穿越，生成新的结构与新的主体性，从而动摇了人类历史曾经的“宏大叙事”。这是一种超越后结构主义工具箱的“非能指符号学”，一种“技术本体论”的顿悟（汉森，《数据的批判》）。在“宏大叙事”被无情解构的后现代全盛时期，他提出的“三重生态”与塞尔所倡导的另一种“大叙事”产生了共鸣：一种“遵循两种普遍格式的叙事，即物理学的定律与遗传学的密码”（塞尔，《枝》，第31页）。

正是在这种共鸣与感应之中，我们倾听王郁洋的叙事——《混成》。正如瓜塔里明确宣称的那样，这是一个在美学—伦理的范式下展开的叙事：在“人类中心论”的式微与人工智能所激发的人类被褫权的焦虑之间，他的作品开辟出一条沉思的前行之路——如同另一种意义上的“宏大叙事”：在秩序与无序、生物与机器、宇宙与人类之间，流动着无尽的交错与博弈。在混沌中涌现延续；在崩塌中孕育新生；在人文主义的遗产之外，萌发出重生的人类共情。

本文英文原载WANG Yuyang: Chaosmosis（Mousse Publishing，2025 春）。中文译文经作者校对。以下为英文原文：

Chaosmosis：or the Return of the Grand Narrative

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 exhibitionTonight 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.

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.

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.

InThe 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.  

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.

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.   

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.

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 theArtificial 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.

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 theMoon 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. 

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.

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.

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.

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).

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.

参考书目

Notes

Hansen, Mark B. “Critique of Data.“ in Critique and the Data, edited byErich H?rl, 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/.

 

张尕

策展人，中央美术学院教授。张尕于2000年代初期组织并策划了北京国际新媒体艺术展暨论坛（2004-2006），将国际媒体艺术的前沿实践与理论介绍给国内观众。曾担任中国美术馆国际媒体艺术三年展系列策展人（合成时代，2008；延展生命，2011；齐物等观，2014）。近年来，策划过多个专题与回顾展，其中包括“动为行——中国媒体艺术35年”（天目里美术馆，2023-2004）、“真实的拓扑”（深圳市当代艺术与城市规划馆，2023）、“人工智能的兑现”（新时线媒体艺术中心/A4美术馆，2022）；第六届广州三年展（联合策展人，2018）、“机器不孤单”（萨格勒布当代艺术博物馆，2018）、“术问：真实的回归”（ZKM|卡尔斯鲁厄艺术与媒体中心，2017-18）、“‘非真实’-算法之当下”（联合策展人，巴塞尔电子艺术中心，2017）。2024年，他分别策划了韩国艺术家金允哲、中国艺术家王郁洋以及张培力个展。他编辑过多本书籍并撰写了众多展览目录文章。在其主持上海新时线媒体艺术中心（CAC）工作期间，亦将其发展为国际媒体艺术论述与实践的枢纽之一。

混成：王郁洋个展

Chaosmosis

A WANG Yuyang Exhibition

2025.11.9-2026.3.29

艺术家：王郁洋

策展人：张尕

出品：北京七九八文化科技有限公司

主办：798CUBE

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5. 如遇特殊活动门票价格浮动、展览信息临时变更，请以官方公告及现场情况为准。

   ＊以上规则将根据相关政策规定进行适时调整。

1. 未满14周岁或身高不足1.2米的儿童、行动不便的观众须由其他成人陪同参观。

2. 醉酒者、精神欠佳者、衣冠不整者，谢绝入馆。

3. 除导盲犬、助听犬外，请勿携带宠物入馆。

4. 请维护良好的观展体验，勿在展览现场喧哗、奔跑、打闹，与展品保持一米距离，勿触摸展品。

5. 请在不妨碍他人的情况下拍照摄像，未经允许勿使用闪光灯、三脚架、自拍杆、打光板等辅助器械。

6. 请您爱护场馆建筑、设施，勿攀爬、粘贴、刻画。

7. 严禁携带武器、凶器、易燃、易爆、剧毒等危险品进馆。

8. 请勿携带超过40厘米的拉杆箱、行李箱等物品，可于馆内存包处免费寄存。

9. 请勿携带食品、饮品进入展厅，馆内全面禁烟。

10. 未经许可，请勿临摹展品及从事与参观无关的活动。

11. 严禁在馆内从事经营活动及未经馆方授权的团体活动。

12. 退场后禁止再次入场。