Harkawik is pleased to present Ziquan Wang’s firrst solo exhibition in the United States. Born in Shenyang in 1993, Wang studied sculpture at the Central Academy of Fine Arts, Beijing, ancient Greek sculpture in Athens, and new media at Royal College of Art, London, where he was awarded a masters degree. During this time, he worked in game theory and user experience design, and soon after the completion of his studies, folded what he had learned into a nuanced investigation into virtuality, systems, and layers in relation to (and in dissonance with) classical sculpture, human-biological renderings and material reality. Wang’s sculpture is itself a tool for the curation and exposition of human encounters, for making visible the interrelationship between intelligence and embodied sentience, and for interrogating the things we think we know about our own bodies, as told to us countless times each day by the devices that fill our world and occupy our minds.

For the past three years, Wang has been focused exclusively on life sculpture situated at the intersection of highly skilled, specialized labor (including the sort of “laboratory accidents” that lead to the invention of new products and services), and raw studio experimentation more closely tied to significant developments in the past 100 years of the practice: Charles Ray, Urs Fischer, Paloma Varga Weisz, Frank Benson, Liz Glynn, Tishan Hsu. Wang’s contribution to (and rebuke of) this lineage is his embedding not only the material accident, but the feedback loop between seamless form and accumulated errata deep into the chemical makeup of the work itself.