This exhibition, the last in the 51㎡ project space series, adopts the tactics of abstraction, relating signal to medium in an attempt to describe in a meaningful way an ontology of autonomous communication.

The visually dominant component here is the work entitled Picture and Character (2010), a massive set of wall paintings on three surfaces paired with typed, printed, and framed lists of words on otherwise blank paper mounted on the fourth wall, left unpainted. The paintings appear similar to barcodes, applied in uneven patches of black and white bars that convey no semantic information to the untrained eye. This is, at least in theory, an automatic translation between language and image that intentionally misconstrues code as literature, generating a form of graphic poetry that, generously speaking, allows one image to convey a second formalized or abstracted image. In this way the work ‘writes’ itself twice, although appreciation of the work on a level other than the conceptual remains a challenge. The second work included, entitled Speak (2010), expresses a certain tension between the dual roles of medium and material by playing back a recording of the sounds of its own recording, moving from the use of media as a tool to the focus on its material existence as content.

(Robin Peckham, 51㎡ #16: Wang Yuyang, 2011[Excerpt])