Fangyang Presses Circulating Images Into Clay and Seals Them in Steel

E.SCAPE Art Space Presents Possessed in Shanghai

Possessed by Fangyang opens at E.SCAPE art space on Wukang Road in Shanghai and runs from October 11 to November 3, 2026, with academic support from Wang Huan and artistic direction by Yuan Yuan Jin.

The wall works are made by transferring laser-printed images onto stone modeling clay and sealing the clay bricks inside frames of chemically treated galvanized steel, some with exposed rebar, two held by a steel F-clamp.

The images come from film stills, comics, advertising and everyday snapshots, worn down by their circulation on the internet. A new video, Until Dawn, Dusk Envelops the Suite, runs 6 minutes 58 seconds with sound by qicheng and is projected onto a suspended structure of clay blocks and steel rebar.

Below, the exhibition text explains why the artist took a word from folk belief and horror film to describe his recent way of working.

Exhibition Text

The title Possessed refers to a concept not commonly used in modern society. It is more often found in ancient conceptions of the body, folk beliefs, or horror films, where it describes a human body being taken over by something beyond the human realm.

In such a situation, the living subject seems almost to lose its agency as it struggles with another force over the use of its own body. Fangyang uses this word to describe his recent way of working. What matters here is the act of one thing “entering” another.

The works in this exhibition carry, to different degrees, a visual quality that is rebellious, unsettling, or even violent. This kind of imagery is often associated with underground and subcultural scenes. The artist’s interest in violence and horror also comes from his experience of growing up with horror films.

Yet this fascination with horror is hardly an individual experience. As early as the 1930s, Hollywood had already turned horror into an industrial genre that could be repeatedly produced.

Through this genre, audiences could “safely” experience danger and seek forms of stimulation that conventional ethical boundaries had never allowed. In this sense, violence and horror have become the broadest common denominator of collective emotional release

Fangyang’s practice begins with the viewing and selection of a large number of stimulating images. Drawing on his own visual experience, he brings together images and objects from different times and places. The sources are diverse: film stills, comics, snapshots of everyday life, advertising images, and so on.

They largely share the qualities of what Hito Steyerl calls “the poor image.” After countless rounds of circulation on the internet, these images are materialized here. The artist transfers these images onto clay, whose rough texture echoes that of the images themselves, and finally seals the physical body of the original images within steel plates.

The brick-like forms, reminiscent of building façades, make the images appear almost like ruins of themselves. Images that had been compressed and damaged, and had lost their original function, thus find themselves in a new context.

In the new video work Until Dawn, Dusk Envelops the Suite, the artist tells a story of occupation in a style close to horror animation. A figure whose biological characteristics are difficult to determine repeatedly moves in and out of different spaces and bodies, eventually occupying a house modeled on the actual form of E.SCAPE art space.

Through this work, the artist responds to the eventful history of the building that now houses E.SCAPE, which has passed through the hands of several owners. When the film ends, the viewer returns to the real world, carrying with them the film’s recurring movements of occupation, possession, and entering and leaving.