The Douglas Hyde presents the first solo exhibition in Ireland by artist and filmmaker Yuyan Wang. Working primarily in film, Wang excavates the vast landscape of digital imagery, distilling hours of found footage into compelling films. Through her rhythmic editing, and punctuated by distinct soundtracks, Wang deconstructs and recontextualises images to consider ideas of extraction, production and waste.

The title of the exhibition #16161D refers to the HEX or colour code for ‘intrinsic grey’ - the uniform dark grey colour that people see in the absence of light, for example, when we close our eyes. Through key works presented in #16161D including Look on the bright side and green grey black brown, Wang considers our ability to absorb and metabolise a constant stream of visual information, from the spectacular to the disastrous.

Both works are presented on the main level of Gallery 1 on opposing screens. Look on the bright side (2023) features both found and self-shot footage and takes the element of light as its focus. Here light is presented as a spectacular material to be marvelled at, whilst also a symbol of human invention to extend our daylight hours and, therefore, extend our ability to work. Scenes from interiors of factories manufacturing LED lights, show the eerie absence of humans, humans at work or caught unaware at rest.

While in Green grey black brown (2024), through collaged video clips gleaned from online sources, Wang reflects on a strange cycle of petro-capitalism (a form of capital accumulation founded on the extraction, distribution, and consumption of petroleum). We see glimpses of fossilised plants and animals, which as they decay constitute the basis of fossil fuels to be extracted through incredibly destructive means to the natural environment. Petroleum, in all forms, flows throughout the work. These images are interspersed with scenes from the interior of factories in DongGuan, in the Guangzhou province China, where imitation plastic plants and flowers are mass produced through injection moulding (the pouring and setting of molten plastic). Shifting in scale between the intimate and the immense, the work reflects the absurd logic of preserving, reproducing or containing nature, whilst simultaneously destroying it at vast scale.

Scattered throughout the gallery space are Monobloc plastic chairs, often claimed to be the world’s most common plastic chair and an icon of cheap, disposable mass production. Also made through injection moulding, the chairs are formed of one solid piece of plastic. The chairs assembled here in the gallery vary slightly in design and size and were sourced from gardens and homes across Dublin. Included in the exhibition, and with audiences encouraged to move and assemble as they like, the chairs echo Wang’s compulsion to conserve and repurpose disposable images circulating online.

Alongside the films presented in Gallery 1, on the lower level Weather (2025) plays on a continuous loop, and shows Wang’s approach to gathering material. An ambient soundtrack of erratic sounds percolate throughout, at points indecipherable or alerting the viewer to spectacular or awe inspiring moments that may be passed by. As a background, they allude to a desensitisation to imagery through sheer volume and rate at which we can now consume them.

In making her work, Wang refers to the intensity of the physical process of metabolising images: consuming, processing and re-presenting the tsunami of information she encounters. From combing the digital landscape, too vast to comprehend as a whole, it is this new era of technological capability rather than our conception of nature that overwhelms. As critic and theorist Frederic Jameson suggests, it is a new sublime, the hysterical sublime. Wang offers her work as an attempt at a birds-eye view of the world, comprised of multiple, disparate and isolated perspectives, gathered carefully and through her lens creates a new understanding of world around us, one we simultaneously create and undo.

The exhibition continues across Gallery 1 and Gallery 2. Look on the bright side and green grey black brown play consecutively in Gallery 1, followed by a ten minute pause, during which a new composition by Raphaël Hénard comes to the fore in Gallery 2. The entire loop for both film and sound work is 40 minutes, and loops continuously throughout the day.