Wang Du | Top Secret: Flying Carpet Ⅲ: Beijing

22 August - 24 October 2010

Hadrien de Montferrand Gallery is honoured to present Top Secret: Flying Carpet III, the rst solo show of Wang Du’s works on paper in Beijing. This will be the rst time that Wang Du’s new project entitled Top Secret will be exhibited to the public and the only time a preparation stage will be recorded on paper. 

Born in WuHan, Hubei province in 1956, Wang Du moved to Paris in 1990 where he is now supported by Laurent Godin gallery. He has exhibited worldwide: Centre Pompidou, Paris; Venice Biennial; Yerba Buena Art Center, San Francisco; Kestnergesellschaft, Hannover; BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead; BPS22, Charleroi; Palais de Tokyo, Paris... His work belongs to the collections of: Centre Pompidou, UCCA Foundation, MuKHA Antwerp, the city of Paris,...” 

Wang Du develops a work based on a critique of images and media hegemony. Collecting photographs reproduced in the press and trans- forming them into sculptural icons, Wang Du sets up and materializes the pictures to denounce their power of social, economic and intellec- tual manipulation. By comparing representation with reality, Wang Du captures a snapshot of today’s world, and is among the contemporary artists who offer one of its sharpest views.

In Top Secret, Wang Du examines the consequences of a tectonic plates movement that would submerge the cities of New-York, Moscow and Beijing. Wang Du surmises that the governments of each city would move important national monuments to a safer place in Africa. Top Secret: Flying Carpet III assumes Chinese authorities would choose the Forbidden City as most worthy of preservation. It describes the relocation of the monument from Beijing and the present exhibition shows stages of this move on paper. As such, Wang Du is now further exploring the link between human and information which are now put in relation with geographical change.