Jiannan Wu’s intricate sculptures are theatrical renditions of pop culture and collective memory

Jiannan Wu is an artist who lives and works between his birthplace in Dalian, China and New York, where he teaches at the New York Academy of Art. It’s within this limbo space between places that the artist’s otherworldly sculptures come to life, representing a topsy-turvy world torn between realities.

Jiannan’s work is concerned with the tension between the public world and private life and the dissonance between spectator and spectacle. Themes of failure, desire and fate are wonderful touches to artworks that could choose to be satirical low-blows, but instead Jinnan invites the viewer to see images of politicians and medical masks (images that many are surely sick of by now) with a renewed empathy and cultural lens. What are the universal themes that link someone on a global platform with someone on a local one? Are these two realities really that different? Heightening the kitsch of pop culture, Jiannan makes bizarro fairytales out of mundane collective memories.

The artist builds scenes that are primarily figurative sculpture and wall-mounted bas-relief, which end up feeling like “compressed stage sets”, relying on cinematographic techniques such as shallow space, forced perspective and theatrical lighting to pull everyday moments into a realm of kooky dreams. The characters of the public world: politicians, footballers, the military, all juxtapose, whilst sharing dense compositions, with autobiographical scenes of the common private world: family dinners, domestic affairs, men asleep on sofas. “I’m interested in how images shape what we think we know – how media, collective memory, and pop culture can turn reality into spectacle,” says Jiannan, who moulds pop culture into a carousel of characters from Woody from Toy Story to Gandalf from The Lord Of The Rings – and lockdown procedures into ferris wheels.

After building a strong frontal composition, Jiannan figures out how many spatial layers the relief needs and where perspectives can heighten the drama. In the process of sculpting the structure, he creates a type of collage of elements, using digital mock-ups or 3D prints to test proportions and depths – then begins to develop figures, gestures, facial expressions and small objects that carry the psychology of the scene. “I treat finishing like cinematography: paint, material contrast, and sometimes embedded LEDs are used to control mood, focus, and rhythm. I like the tension between highly realistic modeling and slightly exaggerated, theatrical details – humor on the surface, but with underlying discomfort or ambiguity,” says Jiannan. “But the ‘why’ has become more intimate: using sculpture as a way to slow down experience, examine it and turn fleeting emotions into something physical and shareable.”