Providence Journal
Art Review: RISD students show their mind-blowing work in sprawling show
 
By Channing Gray 
Special to The Journal
Jun 1, 2016 at 9:30 PM
 
Excerpt
 
If you’re looking for a show that’s all about pushing the envelope, then check out what RISD’s graduating MFA students have created.
The show, up through June 4, contains the thesis work of some 225 MFA candidates. And it’s great to see that the Rhode Island School of Design keeps turning out talent that can blow your mind, like Ziyang Wu, whose mind-boggling animation, “The Story of the Pig,” deserves an Oscar.
Wu was inspired by an incident in his Chinese village, where hundreds of pigs were sacrificed to honor the new mayor. But from there, he has taken images of the lowly pig and run with them, along with a multi-armed guitar-shredding witch.
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The RISD graduate show is free and open Thursday and Friday from noon to 5 p.m., and from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. on Saturday, when RISD holds its commencement.




Aesthetica Magazine
Mapping the Invisible at the Rhode Island School of Design
 
Caia Hagel
11 June 2016
 
Excerpt
 
Graduating shows at the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) are always inspiring for the new perspectives their electrifying creative young minds unfailingly provide. A design school whose graduates are international leaders in the arts and founders of entrepreneurial enterprises like Airbnb, and who are routinely recruited as crucial thinkers into areas that are rarely thought of as design related, from Chief Creative Officers in advertising companies and strategists in top medical research labs, to innovative thinkers in government, NGOs and the CIA—must mean there’s something magic in the RISD formula.
 
Take for example stand-out pieces like The Story of the Pig, a colour digital video with sound by MFA painting student Ziyang Wu that creates an unsettling hybrid of something like Animal Farm meets Kim Jong-un, alongside Living Room Set by Maria Camarena, an organic set of chairs with dresser, lamp, porcelain water filter and stool in classical materials like white oak, wool, terracotta and copper. This excellently crafted furniture in a retro-Scandinavian style feels nouveau American in a way that almost says, “yes, today’s terrorism and extreme right-wing leaders alluded to in The Story of the Pig are real and hard but you’re safe, we’ll comfort you”.