WANG RHONGZHI

“I have been longing for this moment to happen: to have my own solo exhibition. Now I’m obviously happy and excited for this to happen but I’m also strangely feeling a little bit melancholic. While confidently spreading the works all over my studio space, I had this sensation that they will somehow lose their self-assertiveness if they are hung on someone else’s wall.

Sometimes, I choose food ingredients as my main subjects on the canvas, such as grease and burnt food crumbs, which result in a chaotic composition of lines seemingly forming on the surface a pile of grass or a bird’s nest. Organ-like objects, sometimes secreting mucus, diffuse through the layer of chaos happen to be a human head in disguise. I paint following my heart, neither doing so with any pretensions nor purposefully willing to confuse those looking at my art. As I move further along this path, I would often get lost and trapped within this incomprehensible practice.

I am eager to seek out originality, to establish new themes so that I can shape my creativity into something vivid. I am eager to chew up the traditional methods and release them back, to cook them to the point that we are unable to recognize their traces. Be that as it may, I need to paint, and to do it in whichever ways I want.

So what is painting? I cannot explain it thoroughly. But in any case, I am not only here for its beauty.”

Wang Rongzhi

11-07-2016