Frank WANG Yefeng: The Levitating Perils #2

Frank WANG Yefeng’s The Levitating Perils #2 is a series of five animations that continues the artist’s explorations of identity and cultural displacement. The work features an uncanny, yet playful floating red dragon based on historical illustrations of the “Yellow Peril,” a label given to anti-Asian bias that dates back to the birth of European colonialism. The illustrations appeared in newspapers and political cartoons and featured monstrous depictions of Asian figures invading the West. The dragon specifically references the illustration The Ogre of the Orient (1904–05), shown in the background of one of the animations, and is surrounded by handwritten text snippets of the creature’s imagined utterances and deconstructed phrases sourced from “Yellow Peril” materials. A sequence of four animations switches every six hours over the course of the day, with an additional clip interspersed randomly. At certain hours a human head with tentacled horns, mapped with the artist’s facial features, appears as kin to the dragon and is tossed around by invisible forces, an allegory of the turbulent existence of a transnational self. Yefeng immerses viewers in imaginations that dissolve boundaries between myth and history, inviting them into a speculative space.