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.
On the Hour is a series of Internet art projects that mark every full hour around the clock, unfolding over a time frame of thirty seconds. Replacing the Sunrise/Sunset series, which ran from 2009 to 2024 and marked sunset and sunrise in New York City, On the Hour projects are commissioned by the Whitney specifically for whitney.org. The project is also on display on the lobby screen in the museum, and included in the Whitney Museum of American Art’s artport collection.
Using whitney.org as their habitat, On the Hour projects disrupt, replace, or explore the museum website as an information environment. This form of engagement captures the core of artistic practice on the Internet, the intervention in existing online spaces. The series is organized by Christiane Paul, Curator of Digital Art at the Whitney Museum of American Art.
To see the current project, be anywhere on this website on the hour.
https://whitney.org/artport/on-the-hour
