3lla Wang Olsson

Shallow Shadow

05.07.–07.09.2024

Between July 5th and September 7th, 2024, 3lla Wang Olsson transforms LambdaLambdaLambda’s white-cube into an immersive backroom, leaving traces of the online world that reflects on internet identity, screen-based surveillance and web culture. How much of our online visibility is in our control? What changes to our perception when information is constantly coming from the online world? 3lla invites us to enter into a familiar-unfamiliar world providing a glimpse of this through the lens of eastern societies and the modern technological fever dream.

Growing up in Shanghai, the observation of screen-based lifestyle is prominent in 3lla’s work, focusing on finding awareness in how it changes and embodies the world around us. Today, the boundaries between being watched and wanting to be watched are blurred through the portal of online connection. As the camera on our screen is actively used by individuals to share their lives, it also surveils each photo and video shared, creating a database for calculating our personalities. In the video Pose, an e-girl character is walking through the Shanghai metro system and posing in front of the security cameras they encounter. Our attention is shifted towards the invisible eyes of the security camera treating them with the same attention as we would treat our phones.

The paintings Rectum and N’ Act like I don kno nobody included in the exhibition adapt to the composition of a webspace-style-collage. Images are brought together as open tabs, taken from online cultural references such as Batman, Ecco2K, Rick Ross, Boiler Room, Japanese porn advertisements, Rick Owens and Natalie Portman. The references capture an essence of the online world constituted by layers and masks, and through their painterly action, transforms the perspective of the virtual to the tactile.

Shallow Shadow, the exhibition’s title stems from the artist’s series of painted self-portraits. These portraits capture the artist in the process of taking a selfie, however the focus is not on the selfie but rather the rectangular shadow of the phone appearing on the face. The shadow challenges our perspective of the silent control that is our phones. As we navigate the world through the eyes of our smartphone screens and cameras, we often forget about the bodies that exist beside it. The shadow is hiding a part of our face and identity, as a reflection of the part of our soul and energy consumed or dissolved (turned shallow) in supplying our virtual existence.

On the floor of the gallery-space, business cards bearing the online entity XIE3LLA are scattered. These cards provide a glimpse of 3lla’s performance project which involves XIE3LLA, an online entity manifested through chronic onliness. These performances often take place in club settings and involve mixtures of explosive, expressive and self-meditative actions exploring trust collaboration, intuition and story-telling. Cards in 3lla’s works are symbolic for portals into the world of imagination. Having a similar shape to a smartphone, the images and text on cards create an invitation to create your own interpretation. The business cards are inspired by Chinese prostitution cards often found on the floor in Shanghai. Since prostitution is illegal, the cards are the only form of advertising in China that exists in the physical world, away from online surveillance. This is also present in the collage works Enchanted Cards featuring images of Yu-Gi-Yo! Cards, Chinese police surveillance as well as images of XIE3LLA.

The internet seems to create a sense of universal language, yet its experience can be drastically different between users. Shallow Shadow brings together a taste of the artist’s experience of the online world mediated through the lens of Eastern society. Shanghai, in all its modernity, offers a perspective of how advancement in the online world is fused into the real world. The dream of a technological Utopia, so to say. 3lla Wang Olsson researches the question of our awareness within this scenario. Awareness in how images are perceived online, how we are surveilled online, how our energy is embodied and transformed through the online world.

“On the scale of the centuries to come”, Derrida asserts midway through the interview, “I believe there will be veritable mutations in our experience of animality and in our social bond with other animals.” Lui Shtini’s paintings open towards a beginning of a future of strange mutations in our experience of animality, that, like the monstrous mass of flesh trying to intertwine its dots into a collective body, attempt to forge social and artistic bonds that transcend the known limits and delimiting domestications of animality and art.

– Pauline Faivre