Wang Du: USA Weather Report

On October 20, 2025, the opening of Wang Du's contemporary installation took place in the presence of the artist.

The artist, born in China in 1956, has been active in France for 35 years. His visual work questions the conditions in which representations of the contemporary world are produced, primarily through the media.. He develops a body of work that most often deals with the role of the media and the function of images in the perception and organization of the social and political world. Sometimes characterized by an irreverent humor, his works with an often affirmed critical dimension allowed him to be recognized from the end of the 1990s on the international art scene and to multiply the projects as much in the United States and in Europe as in Asia.

Wang Du: USA Weather Report. Resin and acrylic paint.

Eric Lefèbvre, director of the Cernuschi Museum, and Wang Du at the opening.

This sculpture belongs to a series of works representing crumpled sheets of newspaper. Their creation is the result of a long creative process. The initial clay model is handcrafted by the artist, and the reproduction of the newspaper articles on the work's surface is particularly lengthy. The apparent simplicity of the motif is characteristic of Wang Du's work, which opts for striking and easily understandable forms to express often complex ideas. Here, the emphasis is placed on the difficulty of accessing information, made fragmentary by the impossibility of completely deciphering the reproduced articles, and on its rapid obsolescence, symbolized by the newspaper reduced to a ball after reading. The derisory and ineffective nature of this flow of information, immediately forgotten without drawing any conclusions from it, is all the more evident today as this work, almost twenty years old, reproduces a weather forecast.

This contemporary installation is part of the Asia Now VIP tour (October 21 to 26).