Act Normal Ziping Wang

Peres Projects is pleased to present Act Normal, Ziping Wang’s (b. 1995 in Shenyang, CN) third exhibition with the gallery and her first solo exhibition in Berlin. In this new series of oil paintings, Wang continues to explore the overwhelming flow of visual information that characterizes our digital age, leading to a collective fragility of focus. Her large-scale, collage-like paintings capture the contemporary torrent of image-based content conceived to capture our attention, while often failing to hold it. These compositions capture a saturated, kaleidoscopic reality, where colours, shapes, and patterns compete for our gaze, offering fleeting clarity while intentionally obscuring any fixed narrative. Still, the exhibition’s title, Act Normal, serves as a reminder, a note to self and to the viewer, to observe the noise of modern existence without fully absorbing it, maintaining focus and presence amidst collective digital chaos and the inevitable misunderstandings it brings.
In this body of work, Ziping Wang blends symbols of consumer culture with creative devices borrowed from Ancient Roman frescoes, particularly those that evoke the sensation of viewing scenes through a window, creating a disorienting yet intricately crafted world. Building on her earlier painted collages of magnified product packaging, Wang’s latest series evolves her visual language. By incorporating elements of street signage, snack logos, Ukiyo-e Japanese motifs and commercial branding amongst others, she creates environments that are both familiar and eerie. This tension between the mundane and the surreal reflects Wang’s ongoing reflection of modern spaces, where icons and symbols, once loaded with meaning, are reconfigured into unsettling, ambiguous forms. Wang’s ability to intertwine chaotic symbols with meticulous detail fosters a landscape that feels paradoxically controlled and disordered.
A recurring grey and white checkered pattern, evoking the transparent image background used in digital editing software tools, punctuates the scenes, serving as a grounding element that brings relief in the midst of a fragmented composition. This motif acts as a visual reminder that, even in a seemingly chaotic visual field, structure remains—offering a subtle anchor for the eye amidst the swirling digital vernacular. In Act Normal, Wang’s compositions are further enriched by her use of architectural structures and buildings, which are distorted and reconfigured into imaginary, dystopian cityscapes. Through these images, she subverts conventional ideas of stability and order, presenting urban environments where gravity and perspective have shifted, and reality itself is called into question. Central to this series are street signs and billboards, objects designed to capture our gaze and impose meaning. In Wang’s reimagining, these once-directive symbols lose their power, floating ambiguously, disconnected from their original context. Letters and shapes hover without purpose, suspended between legibility and abstraction. Through this disruption of familiar signifiers, Ziping Wang encourages viewers to reconsider the relationship between communication and meaning, turning her work into a visual puzzle that resists any simple resolution. Wang’s painting titles add another layer of mystery, selected from a personal notebook as word-collages detached from the paintings' direct content, further allowing the works to escape a singular or definitive interpretation.
Ultimately, Ziping Wang’s paintings are not fixed, but suspended in a moment of creation wherein things are ever unfolding, capturing a sense of incompleteness. Each piece not only unveils a complex image but, paradoxically, also the space between it—what is implied yet remains unrealized. In this sense, her work is a playful mirror of the human experience itself: constantly in flux, perpetually unfinished, and open to a multitude of perspectives. Through her exploration of fragmented forms and cryptic symbols, Ziping Wang invites the viewer into a space of endless discovery.