Chinese artist Wang Xiyao paints expressive works on canvas, translating life experiences, embodied tensions, and movement into collections of gestural marks.
Read MoreWang was born in Chongqing, China. She received two Bachelor's degrees, one from the Sichuan Fine Arts Institute in 2014 and the other from the University of Fine Arts Hamburg in 2018. She received her MFA from the University of Fine Arts Hamburg in 2020.
Wang Xiyao's energetic work is inspired by her own life experiences. Through painting, she attempts to translate these encounters and emotions onto the canvas. Wang often paints in what seems to be the tradition of abstract expressionism and action painting, working with flowing, bold lines that hover at the corners of her work.
Employing a varied range of colour, Wang's paintings invoke feelings of movement and uncontained energy. She distills concepts such as weightlessness and liberation into her large-scale work by creating immersive scenes. The titles of the paintings often hint at their subject matter, yet still leave interpretation largely up to the viewer. For example, in her painting Pikachu (2021), Wang hints at the popular character from the Pokémon franchise, yet the painting remains mysterious as a scratchy, indistinguishable yellow figure floats in the centre, surrounded by vibrant patches and gestural lines of blues, reds, and oranges. She more commonly titles her work with ambiguous statements and scenarios such as River, River, Could You Tell Me The Story Of My Hometown (2022), One day of summer (2020), and Swimming in Plötzensee on Monday (2021).
The visual language used in her work is a combination of several influences, ranging from Taoism, Chinese landscape painting, bodywork, Western art history, and electronic music. Through her paintings, Wang attempts to make sense of bodily displacement and the tension between lived experience and its representation, as well as the tension between Eastern and Western traditions and art practices.
Wang Xiyao has held solo exhibitions at Soy Capitán, Berlin; Paul Roosen Contemporary, Hamburg; and A Thousand Plateaus Art Space, Chengdu. Her work has been included in group presentations and exhibitions at Art Basel; Beijing Contemporary Art Expo; Tang Contemporary Art, Beijing; and Art Dubai.
Wang's website can be found here and her Instagram account can be found here.
Arianna Mercado | Ocula | 2022
