This booklet is designed by Charles Mazé & Coline Sunier. Texts are written by Elsa Vettier, edited by Maria Claudia Gamboa and translated by Claudio Cambon. The booklet includes an interview with Rafael Moreno and Yuyan Wang. 

Elsa Vettier: Let’s begin with the titles of your exhibitions: Rafael, you chose The World, and Yuyan, you opted for Glowing, flaring, lurid, loud. Both are very open. They invoke certain abstractions: the world in the case of the former and the intensity of light and sound in the latter. What do these titles say about your respective exhibitions?

Yuyan Wang: These four adjectives—glowing, flaring, lurid, loud—come from Chroma*, book that the artist Derek Jarman wrote as he was going blind. It is composed solely of adjectives that describe his sensations tied to colours. This intimate experience also becomes a reflection on society. These words resonate with the two films I am screening in the exhibition, which explore the origins of artificial light. Glowing, flaring, lurid, loud carefully describes the qualities of this light so glaringly bright that it seems audible.

EV: I sense an intent to describe something that eludes us, using just a few words, a bit like talking about the “world”.

Rafael Moreno: Yes, the expression The World is a paradox: an attempt to encompass everything, even though it describes something that we cannot grasp. For me, the world is both a conscious immensity that is so much larger than us and at the same time an unconscious, interior construct. The world as we know it rests on a partition in our minds.

This title came to me last summer, when I was thinking about debt (in the economic, moral, and existential sense). I became interested in the research of Brazilian philosopher Denise Ferreira da Silva**, which explains how the concept of debt was used to bolster colonisation, binding individuals to an obligation to produce and preventing them from engaging in any kind of rebellion. She points out how the Western gaze unequivocally imposes what “the world” is: a kind of hallucination pushed to its extreme.

Maria Claudia Gamboa: You both describe a back-and-forth between what is visible and palpable and the realm of projection, of mental images. What form does that take in your respective exhibitions?

YW: In China, we say that the darkest place is underneath the candlestick. Light does not exist without darkness. Glowing, flaring, lurid, loud is a light environment like a “day for night”***, a tension between the visible and the invisible, the conscious and the unconscious. The two films screened at each end of the space paint a portrait of a society subjected to permanent light, visibility, and constant production. At one end, Look on the Bright Side depicts a flow of images that immerses the body in an artificial light, while at the other, The Moon Also Rises leaves a couple of elderly people in the shadows as they try to keep up with the fast pace of modernity. Between the two, a theatre of shadows creates a projective space where viewers are asked to envision what exists past what their eyes can see. In our world shaped by and mediated through images, we want everything to be visible. But this overexposure also produces blind spots, mysterious zones that evade visual analysis. The project works between these two extremes of overexposure and opacity to reveal that which resists becoming visible.

RM: When I arrived at CRAC, I realised that the building itself comprises spaces that are conscious (the exhibition spaces that the public visits) and unconscious (the attic, for example, which remains inaccessible). I constructed the exhibition by activating these “unconscious” zones so that they reappear within the “conscious” space, using video and sculpture. But this system quickly became more complex: sculptures-boxes, sometimes sealed and sometimes punctured, ultimately confuse this duality.

There are two references underlying this approach. One comes from cinema. In Ingmar Bergman’s Persona (1966), two women mirror one another, and their relationship is built on projections. The other comes from the history of artificial intelligence, specifically the Turing Test, in which a machine tries to pass itself off as human by muddling cues, especially gender-related ones. What both these stories reveal is that we never have full access to another person; we must articulate the relationship using projections and social constructs (such as gender) that become parameters for qualifying someone’s humanity. The exhibition reproduces this logic in the form of spaces that are boxed up and in which experience is constructed using fragments and indirect perceptions.

EV: These two exhibitions immerse us in your way of working, specifically your practice of gleaning, whether this consists of the things that you, Rafael, find in the street, or the images that you, Yuyan, find online. How did this working method come about?

YW: I began working with found images on the Internet during the Covid-19 epidemic. I was no longer able to film under normal conditions, so the screen became my research area. I soon realised that image saturation was part of my daily reality and mental landscape. Holding a camera up to reality no longer seemed a sufficient way of capturing its complexity. For me, images are no longer simple vectors of information; they are like an atmospheric layer that we traverse and that traverse us as well. Working with existing images lets me connect different times and contexts. In a way, this echoes my training in traditional Chinese painting, where, in the depiction of a landscape, several perspectives and realities coexist, and there might not be a vanishing point. For that matter, in traditional Chinese painting, the goal is to reveal the realm of the imperceptible. In my films, I often work with primary elements such as the ocean, the earth, or light, subjects that are impossible to grasp fully—and it is precisely this impossibility of representing everything that interests me. So, working with the void is essential; it invites viewers to project their own imaginations.

EV: In working without a camera, you are experimenting with another way of making films, as if you were sculpting an existing material. It’s almost the opposite in your exhibition, Rafael, where the sculpture instead becomes an image. Whether it is filmed or visible through a hole, we don’t have a direct physical experience of it.

RM: For me, in sculpture, the relationship to objects and volumes is first created through gestures. My work is tied to urbanity; many of the objects come from the street, a space of movement, in which gestures are accumulated. We often think of sculpture as a finished, independent object.  So, the Pinocchias—sculptures that I make using mannequins and other objects—play precisely with this ambiguity. They have a defined shape, but when you look at them more closely, their humanoid appearance turns out to be artificial, constructed through assemblage. This evokes the question of the body as something that we cannot consider as finished because it is always active. I would like for viewers to engage with these sculptures physically, move about, adjust their point of view, and notice the details. It is definitely a mental experience because it is a process of assembling clues, but it remains corporeal, made of gestures and perceptions that are at times unconscious. It’s like when you see a bench on the street with some empty cans; you instantly imagine what might have happened there.

MCG: Whether it’s LED lights or bodies made of plastic, your practices very much concern the issue of artificiality. What interests you about this notion, and how has it influenced the way that you make art?

RM: The found objects with which I work are produced and exist within the system of the city. A city is a complex system in which politics, technology, and economic decisions generate hierarchies and scales of value. Observing objects lets us understand how these systems actually work and how they define reality. An everyday object always refers to larger economic realities that define its value and lifespan. For that matter, we can draw parallels between hierarchies of objects and of persons. The distinction between the artificial and the non-artificial also contributes to this shaping of our reality, which has been expressed in history by excluding, isolating, and objectifying certain individuals.

YW: I spend a lot of time these days thinking about the growth of artificial intelligence and how it is changing our relationship to images. AI has rendered the status of images more ambiguous. The moment an image is subjected to algorithmic flows, it tends to get away from its creator and become a common entity that lies past our individual control as its author. The logic of extracting and appropriating images that I have used until now no longer means the same thing, as we are no longer truly producers or organisers of images. So, what is the role of the artist in this process? Paradoxically, this sensation of technological progress raises more primordial questions about our relationship to ourselves, other people, and the environment. These forward-looking tools reactivate archaic feelings, especially fear—likely that of the unknown, for starters. My artistic practice has become a way to confront this; it’s almost an exercise in surviving this influx. As we collect and make montages of images, I sense that we must come back to the body and let all this information run through it, think with our gut, follow our intuitions, and try to establish bonds where reason does not suffice.

EV: What does your workspace look like?

YW: My workspace is a screen, an interface with an intangible appearance that is actually deeply connected to the body. I experience it physically. By interacting with digital images, they end up merging into me and forming a material that is both algorithmic and organic, in which the temporality of the machine comes up against the corporeal reality of the process of montage.
As in a metabolic process, my retina transforms the image pixels into experiences, sensations, visual thoughts. In this sense, I am handling this material in an analogue, almost artisanal manner. I begin by using what already exists within our visual field to reveal the relationships between images as well as their potential for wonder. Through a process of montage, they can suddenly acquire a physical, almost sculptural form.

RM: My work environment is indissociable from my living situation, which I consider to be a raw material in its own right. This lets me be quite spontaneous in developing my pieces. There was a time when I worked in my room. Sometimes I would complete a piece in an hour because I was pressed for time. I now have a studio in a shuttered store in the middle of a mall. This space makes a lot of sense, because I’m working in the very heart of an environment devoted to consumption. It’s a privilege to have a space dedicated entirely to one’s practice, but at the same time, spending too much time there risks detaching the work from its context. So, I try to use the space differently to preserve those moments of improvisation that occur when I manipulate these objects.

EV: Yuyan, you assign great importance to the soundtracks of your films, and you regularly work with sound artists. Rafael, your exhibition at CRAC also involves music, because you are planning to host a concert here with your band, Feet 41, in which you play guitar. What role does music play in your respective exhibitions?

RM: There is this notion of a rock band as an anarchic, disorderly presence pervading this exhibition. To me, it represents an inner libidinal energy that one chooses to express at different levels. Music, guitars, which have been a part of my life since adolescence, perhaps come from that: an intensity rather than a discourse. And I like the idea of this energy travelling. It’s more important than the forms.

YW: For me, sound is a sensuous medium that acts directly on the body. In my work, it becomes an architectural tool, connecting images and structuring the narration. One of the films is based on an absence of words, while the other is constructed using fragments of language that dislocate and produce a sensation of drifting along freely. So, in The Moon Also Rises, the narration is the result of a montage of scientific and advertising content around the light, which I use to compose the story of an artificial moon. In Look on The Bright Side, we hear The Realm by C’hantal, an a cappella piece that is often played in nightclubs because it’s so enveloping, almost incantatory. The lyrics say: “For your mind, your body and your soul”. The films talk to one another. Sound is a ghostly presence that awakens buried memories.

MCG: You were born in China and Colombia, where you began studying art before you moved to France. Yuyan, you just mentioned your training in traditional Chinese painting. How do you look back on these learning experiences and your transnational artistic journey?

YW: My training at a Fine Arts Academy in China was already a bit of a patchwork; we learned bits and pieces of Western art history using reproductions that we then copied. Later on, when I saw the original works in the Louvre, I was quite shocked, because I realised the extent to which the images we studied had been transformed and even deformed in the process of circulating. So, my education was based on this “misunderstanding” produced by the proliferation of images. Confronted with this dissonance, I developed a compulsive desire to absorb for the sake of understanding things, which has extended into the present to my process of gleaning images. Mimicry becomes a way to engage with kinds of knowledge that are unfamiliar to me and to transform them into a living material for my practice.

RM: Moving from one society to another has made me very sensitive to the systems that organise them, simply because I experience the contrasts between them. What matters the most to me at this point is identity: how it’s constructed and how it remains multifaceted and even contradictory at times. Slowly but surely, we learn to look at these different parts of which we are composed with a critical distance, and to get them to coexist.

Interview led by Elsa Vettier and Maria Claudia Gamboa, February 2026. 

*Derek Jarman, Chroma. A Book of Colour, London: Century, 1994.
**Denise Ferreira da Silva, Unpayable Debt, Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2019.
***In filmmaking, the expression “day-for-night” refers to the techniques for shooting scenes in daylight that, in the film, are supposed to take place at night.

• Livret : Booklet -1.pdf (pdf)