Perrotin Dosan Park is pleased to present Allongé – Out of Reach, an exhibition by Berlin-based painter Xiyao Wang. The Chinese-born artist's dynamic, expansive works are endowed with a palpable presence—or perceptual affect—generated through a highly physical painting process in which bold gesture finds form amid vast fields of empty space. For her second solo presentation with the gallery, Wang expands her ongoing inquiry into expressions of embodied subjectivity, producing large-scale gestural abstractions that implicate notions of temporality and mobility, form and void, substance and spirit. Her paintings disclose a minimal approach to mark-making that derives from the artist's introspective exploration of subconscious states of spatial awareness, filtered through a cross-cultural lens that integrates sensible phenomena, spatial receptivity and philosophical hermeneutics.

Traversed by lines of black charcoal and punctuated with accretions of colourful oil stick, Wang's canvases evince a reductive visual vocabulary that activates empty space as an indelible compositional element, lending her works a bearing of kinetic poise. These arresting visual manifestations of corporeal experience resonate with her own practice as an avid student of ballet—a rigorous regimen of harnessing the body's energy and attaining control over its every movement while executing complex and physically demanding choreography. Among the frequent verbal cues that ballet dancers receive throughout their training is allongé, a French term which reminds dancers to elongate their position at the beginning or end of a movement by extending their arm(s) and focusing their attention on the continuity of line that their body creates. In this respect, _allongé _is a centring mechanism through which the dancer's breath, body tension and mental concentration become fully integrated—either in a moment of preparation that channels their energy toward realising the prescribed movement to the best of their ability, or an act of completion that aids in sustaining their physical and mental intensity until the movement has fully subsided.

For Wang, _allongé _functions as a mantra for conjuring cognitive composure prior to the instant in which her hand makes contact with the canvas. This critical interval of non-painting is as consequential as the undertaking of mark-making itself, for it is in this brief moment that the sensory impulses in her mind reach their fullest extension. Only after such a point is reached does she begin to inscribe these fleeting sensations onto the picture plane in broad sweeping strokes and condensed staccato scribbles. The clarity and precision of this transfer is therefore vital to the integrity of the artwork, as is the quality and character of each individual line. By invoking an additional _allongé _at the conclusion of these freehand gestures, Wang further prolongs the impetus of each stroke past its terminus, ensuring that every abstract marking consummately condenses the full breadth of her intention. Although this painting methodology bespeaks a certain spontaneity, it is by no means improvisational—the creative decisions that she makes in front of the canvas are always measured and deliberate, each in the service of elevating the expressive potential of the painted line.

In addition to the moment-to-moment sensitivity that is so essential to Wang's painting practice, _allongé _also operates in a more relational context that corresponds to its application in ballet performance as a means of coordinating one's movements with other dancers. Whether positioned in group formation or standing alongside a partner in a duet, dancers must activate a heightened state of awareness in order to sense one another's subtle _allongé _without ever looking directly at their fellow performers. Such subliminal proprioception enables elite dancers to move in perfect synchronicity while executing sinuous and strenuous choreography in perfect unison. _Allongé _is thus conceived as a means of extending one's body into its surroundings by assimilating oneself with the space that it occupies—a space of as-yet unrealized movement and a visual void that permits the human figure to assert a more acutely perceived presence. This sensitivity to empty space is similarly activated in Wang's new works, where much of the canvas is left unpainted and each of her distinct strokes, squiggles and smudges assumes an amplified air of decisiveness.

Among a host of modern and contemporary artists whose works also resonate with this sense of emptiness, Wang cites Cy Twombly as a figure of significant influence on the development of her practice, finding a kindred spirit in the American painter whose calligraphic swirls and haphazard scrawls redefined the language of abstract expressionism in the mid-twentieth century. Regardless of the gestural predilection that animates both artists' creative output, it is their shared reverence for empty space—not as a blank surface or perceptual lacuna, but as a veritable substance unto itself in the minimal milieu of their paintings—which aligns their practices through a dialectic of painterly affect. Indeed, the immediacy that suffuses works such as Twombly's _Olympia _(1957) and Wang's _Allongé no. 1 _(2023) derives as much from the restraint of each artist's approach to mark-making as the intensity and dynamism with which they render the sparse strokes that extend across the otherwise empty picture plane. Rather than manifesting as a cerebral formulation of discernible signifiers, this immediacy arises as an embodied sensation that displaces conscious awareness in favor of a more visceral and inchoate response to the painting-as-an-event. By conceiving of the canvas as a field of experience as opposed to a vessel of quantifiable meaning, we open ourselves to the metaphysical phenomenon of affect in which empty space functions as a perceptual gateway to the non-human universe that exists beyond cognitive comprehension.

Whereas the philosophical conception of affect was relatively obscure in the West until the 1980s, an analogous dialectics of interpenetration between the self and the universe has long served as a core tenet of Chinese cultural thought, which draws heavily from the ancient Taoist cosmology. Formalized more than 2000 years ago in Laozi's Tao Te Ching, Taoism posits that reality and nihility exist as inseparable opposites that collectively comprise the flow of the universe—known as Tao—and are immanent in all things, whether tangible or intangible, limited or unlimited. Such non-dualistic notions of human experience have since permeated all aspects of Chinese society, beginning with popular cultural practices such as traditional ink painting. Artists have historically extrapolated the Taoist tandem of existence and non-existence to conceive that any painted rendering of the visible world must also include its imperceptible inverse—that is, the invisible void. It was through such thinking that empty space emerged as a quintessential component of Chinese art as early as the Tang Dynasty (618-907), when the concept of the 'intended blank' (Chinese: 留白, Korean: 여백) first took hold among painters and subsequently developed into one of the most recognisable attributes of Chinese aesthetics throughout the past 1000 years.

Growing up in Chongqing, China, Wang was exposed to a diverse range of Chinese and Western artworks thanks to the influence of her father, a painter himself. It was during her childhood years that she first encountered the 'intended blank' in traditional Chinese landscape painting—although its philosophical implications likely did not sink in until many years later—while looking at and studying paintings she found in exhibition catalogues and monographs purchased by her father. From the age of four, Wang would regularly sit down with these books and try to copy the images she saw, gradually teaching herself the rudiments of painting and absorbing traditional techniques such as using blank space as a structural counterpoint to the natural scenery depicted in Chinese landscapes. It wasn't until she entered art academy as an adolescent, however, that the Taoist basis for this principle became clear to Wang. Although Wang's artistic inclinations ultimately propelled her painting practice toward abstraction, this understanding of the 'intended blank' remained lodged in her subconscious until she began exploring Cy Twombly's paintings in more detail as a graduate student, when her dormant awareness of empty space as something more than merely unpainted canvas was suddenly reawakened.

That this emergent cognisance of the 'intended blank' coincided with her ongoing ballet training during graduate school may have been the catalyst for adopting _allongé _as a modus operandi in her own painting praxis and inducing a more profound engagement with the corporeal subjectivity that defines her oeuvre. As a physical sensation and cognitive state that belongs entirely to the realm of spatial experience, _allongé _can never be fully encapsulated in words, nor can painterly affect be approximated by anything other than directly beholding an artwork suffused with such visceral magnetism. Wang's vigorous outpouring of gestural lines upon the perceptual infinitude of unpainted space enables viewers to embrace the ungraspable and expand their consciousness beyond purely rational or empirical conclusions. This imperative of reaching toward something which is impossible to locate, or indeed quantify in objective terms, is what imbues her works with its arresting potency and singular presence. Wang invites us to harness the non-duality of the _Tao _itself, offering a site of encounter where the matter inside of us responds to the matter all around us in a simultaneous resonance of the artist's intent, her gestural collision with the canvas and our own ineffable experience as witnesses to this affective spatiotemporal dance.

Press release courtesy Perrotin.