Frank WANG Yefeng
Frank WANG Yefeng
“Whose Peril?” includes an outdoor video installation, 3D animations, sculptures, drawings, and writings. The project responds to the returning surge in hate against Asian communities. It delves into the genealogy of “Yellow Perilism,” which roots within a long tradition of Eurocentric representation of Asia as a threat to the “West.” The project’s trajectory begins with the interrogation of a racial incarnation - a vicious octopus (Sax Rohmer, 1913) that consistently appears via western images and documents. Such antagonization of Asia helped manifest the “imagined Western” identification and its colonialist dysfunctions.
As a century-long fear still lives ubiquitously in subtler ways nowadays, the Yellow Perilist anxieties are exposed and interrogated in this project. "Yellow to whom and Peril to whom?" The scrutinies of such questions are carried out through the appropriation and deconstruction of a historically rigid racial symbol.
This project is supported by Denver Digerati as a commissioned animation for Supernova Digital Animation Festival's Night Lights Denver program, Denver, CO. This public projection mapping installation is on display nightly through the month of September, 2021 in the Denver Theatre District (DTD).