Viewing Yan Wang Preston rewrites art history and contests power in dazzling, giant photographs

The Chinese-British photographer Yan Wang Preston presents a new body of work that has been three years in the making for her second solo exhibition at Messums on Cork Street. Titled Three Easier Pieces, the exhibition sees the artist restage three iconic historical artworks in large-scale photographs: Manet’s Olympia; Wanderer above the Sea of Fog, by Caspar David Friedrich and To Add a Metre to an Anonymous Mountain, a collaborative work organised by artist Zhang Huan. Wang Preston reimagines these works in thoughtful and provocative ways, reversing roles to ask questions about where we are in British society today when it comes to migrant and marginalised bodies.