Yuyan Wang, a Chinese director and artist now based in Paris, imagines a world where oil, or an oil-like substance, is the glue that holds everything together, an allegory that messes with global notions of capitalism and extraction and questions the future — of this world and ours.
Yuyan Wang once again demonstrates exceptional mastery in exploring the plastic and rhythmic possibilities of editing, manipulating images sourced from the internet to build a critical reflection on technology. Here, it is the gory logics of petro-capitalism that is exposed and orchestrated to the rhythm of the machine — and of the black ooze that drips like a living organism — the hidden side of the technological promise of a bright future. One might say Wang manipulates even sound: a hit from the 1980s appears here distorted, dragged out like the oil flowing through the images. The result is a truly hypnotic visual and sonic trip, in which we find ourselves watching with melancholy the imagery of the most concrete apocalypse. (Cláudia Marques)
