Wang Du and PostHumanity

In 1992, artist Jeffrey Deitch orchestrated an exhibition titled PostHuman which focused on the accelerated mutations of the human body through surgery, cosmetics, drugs and other artificial measures.The exhibition referenced a New York Times Article, which reads as follows:

On most people’s beauty scale, Stacey Stetler would be a 10. A blond, blue-eyed, 5-foot-11 New York model, she has confidently sashayed down the runway for Yves Saint Laurent in Paris and has graced the covers of fashion magazines. But until recently, when Ms. Stetler looked in the mirror she saw less perfection and more flaws. "I was flat-chested," Ms. StetIer said. "You couldn’t tell if I was coming or going. My back protruded almost as much as my front...”Ms. Stetler enhanced her boyish figure by having breast implants. She is not alone.

PostHuman and the CyberFuture was a hot topic in the 90s. Advancements in science and gadgetry made a distant future seem not quite so distant.The next expected leaps in science were promised to be no more than five years away. Ten at the most. Ten years later, most of these leaps turned out to be short skips and the anticipation for clones and cybernetic bodies has since died down. However, the habit of altering our bodies to perfection has not.

Surrealism might be the term for Du's work if not for how
accurately his statues reflect reality.

Like Stacey Stetler, the quest for the ideal augmented human body continues to accelerate. So much so that "all-natural" human beings are the smallest minority in modernized society. Hair quality and color is changed. Muscles are enhanced. Breasts are enlarged. Tummies are tucked and faces are cut and lasered back into a state of ideal youth. The ubiquity of such modifications has made it so commonplace that no one – not the media or the passing pedestrian – stops to question it.

"Transforming your body has
become a way of adapting
to modern society."
- Wang Du

Wang Du, a Chinese artist who was greatly influenced by Deitch's PostHuman exhibition, remains one of the few active observers and commentators on our augmented existence. In in 1997, five years after Deitch's exhibition, Du featured his own exhibition, comprised of nude statues that constituted the people of the future – people who had the luxury of redesigning their bodies through biotechnology. Far from being a mere objective observation of our alterations, Wang's recreated human bodies are a wholesale distortion of space and form. Appendages are enlarged to disproportionate scales, forcing us to reconsider the ubiquitous augmentations that we have learned to overlook. Such metamorphosis is found in his late 90s sculpture set Family. The piece showcases a TransFamily where every member has been revamped with somatic addendum's that are not far away from flesh alterations in celebrity culture."Transforming your body has become a way of adapting to modern society." Du has commented.

Surrealism might be the term for Du's work if not for how accurately
his statues reflect reality. Or maybe it is the correct term since his work so accurately reflects the surreality of media images. The gap between nonfiction and the demi-nonfictional representations in mass media remains one of Du's constant targets. His 2001 sculpture, No Comment, is an over-sized waste basket filled with discarded media, including a still active television set. Du feels that the images of mass media contribute as much to our hyper-bodies as the plastic surgeons knife.

Indeed, it is in mass media where we witness a minute-by-minute
parade of hyper-sexual, hyper-artificial human beings. Exaggerated
almost to the point of androgyny, the over-scaled masculinity of men
and seductive appeal of women walk up to the line of becoming
epicene caricatures. Du steps in to push these images past that line, creating overt sexual and sexless forms that reveal mass media to be a dark parody of itself. Note his 1997 sculpture that features a blonde with her hands proudly exhibiting her enhanced breasts. The statue echoes the notorious 1993 Rolling Stone cover that showcased the cupped altered breasts of Janet Jackson.
Though Du's sculpture is not a reaction to that specific image, it is a calculated response to what such imagery has engendered.

Over ten years later, Du continues to tweak the proportions of the human body – and so does media and society.
The question of Wang's importance as a "savage critic of society" is no question at all. Few will deny either the
issues of self-image or the images that drives it. However, even fewer are prepared to admit that any of this might
actually be a problem. The means to shoe-horning our bodies into agreement with our ideal image is so accessible
and affordable that the reasons for doing so are self-validating. It's difficult to see Wang's work holding up to a
North American audience whose narcissistic consumer attitude is so common that its existence need not be
defended. This, of course, is what makes Wang's work so important. He forbids that we take the altered human
as granted, or allow the artificial to pass for the natural. Consequently, Wang Du is a reality-check, which
thankfully we don't have to rely on mass-media to receive.