Yan Wang Preston – gloriously confronting art history in the nude (Guardian)
Wang Preston’s subversive reworking of Friedrich proposes a different relationship with the land. In her version of the image, the figure (the artist herself) is naked – buttocks exposed to the freezing temperatures of the South Pennines, where the photograph was made. Wang Preston stood there for as long as she could handle (10 minutes).
Part portrait, part witness to this solitary durational performance (which will be repeated, with other people, throughout the rest of the year) the raw discomfort Wang Preston felt in standing naked in snow, she has said, is akin to what she experiences as a Chinese woman encountering the exoticised female nudes in canonical western paintings. Rather than the promise of domination, Wang Preston’s nude wanderer offers endurance and symbiosis with the land. Following the trajectory of ecofeminists, Wang Preston frames her “exotic” body in the landscape to point to the way both have been degraded and dominated by the male gaze.
