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Available articles about Wang Xingwei
- 1. I quote, therefore I am - Wang Xingwei's chameleonic painting
- 2. "Large Rowboat" is not a Group Show
- 3. The Bad and Beautiful Paintings
I quote, therefore I am - Wang Xingwei's chameleonic painting
Wang Xingwei (*1969) is one of the most peculiar painters I have ever met. His production, although limited in number (a hundred paintings in the last ten years), shows, on the whole, an astonishing variety. A rather enigmatic person, his reflexive silences are often interrupted by spontaneous and generous laughter. Day after day, and with great lucidity, he has built up the recognition which nowadays people accord to him both at home and abroad. He absolutely refuses, however, to allow that recognition to limit his free will or the critical and corrosive vein to his paintings that is always new and constantly exercised afresh. And which allows him to apply, without any limit whatsoever, his free will and a critic and corrosive vein to his painting's always new exercise.
Born and raised in the Chinese region of Dongbei (North-East, also called Manchuria), he has faced, from the very beginning, the academic local tradition of oil painting, which is aimed at obtaining an accomplished technical skill and at building up a personal style, a recognisable cipher which distinguishes every single artist. To this commonly accepted approach, Wang Xingwei opposes a practical critique which has become more and more articulate and assured.
At the beginning of his creative phase, in the first half of the Nineties, even though he knew well that painting was considered a somehow 'by-passed' artistic form in the West, Wang consciously chose to dedicate himself to it. However, his strategy has been to take an oblique approach towards both the technique and the subject, a kind of pictorial meta-language which he has continued to perfect and to develop into a highly sophisticated parallel.
From the very first paintings we can notice that the artist uses both the history of western and local art, especially after-Duchamp, as a main fountain head, and that he conjugates it with autobiographical allusions and political and social questions. It is as if he was re-writing personal and collective history, evoking times and places, placing famous people alongside himself and his family members, widening the already infinite chances painting has to modify reality. In oils like 'Dusting away the romantic male history' (1995) or 'Poor old Hamilton' (1996), the artist reproduces and juxtaposes fragments of artworks by different artists of different times - from Ingres, to Duchamp, to Hamilton - with an ironic nonchalance that is breathtaking. In them, the technique adapts itself to the theme and to the style of the original work, stressing the fact that its semantic relevance cannot be separated from the subject.
On the other side 'The oriental way' (1995) and 'Blind' refer to episodes of the recent history of the People's Republic, where the social function attributed to painting by the regime, with its heavy load of rigid and univocal symbolism, has negated the freedom of creativity that art requires, provoking thus situations very similar to those of the 'degenerated art' in Nazi Germany.
Nowadays the artist considers the paintings of that period too explicit, filled with quotations which, although refined, are quite easy to recognise for a careful and cultivated reader. In those works the painter is now aware of having followed, although in a personal way, the same method of the 'mass-code' applied by socialist realism: even though the meaning he wants to convey is here decided individually by himself. While the juxtapositions are daring and fresh, the viewer is carefully guided to a reading which is univocal. So doing, the artwork is deprived of that aura of 'undefined', 'secret', 'unsaid' which should be its primary characteristic.
And it is exactly that connotation of 'unsaid' which stimulates Wang, tickles him and pushes him to continue his research, moving on in the culturally stratified field of art history, and mixing it with actuality and autobiography. The references used are now chosen from a much wider source, and therefore less immediately recognisable.
As time goes on, the artist builds up a system of quotations which refer to his own works. We discover then that an installation dating to the year 2002, made of the neon writing 'Et in Arcadia ego', which has been hung on the façade of a museum in Suzhou, has been preceded by an oil painted in 1996. On a background with a landscape in the Poussin style, there is a male figure who discovers on a ruin the words 'IN ARCADIA'. The same male - tall and slender - appears in many other paintings, and loosely resembles the painter himself. In this case the Latin quotation, which may appear quite familiar to a European, is totally cryptic for a Chinese viewer, and the artist admits that even for himself it retains a purely literary connotation, as it lacks the familiarity he feels for other subjects, nearer in time and space.
One of the most disconcerting characteristics of Wang Xingwei's pictorial production is the total lack of an aesthetic norm. When asked about it, he vaguely answered that he "likes best paintings with strong colours". On the other side his use of colour is very far from the traditional concept of harmony: the chromatic juxtapositions are often daring, or they are previously decided following laws fixed by the artist. In this way he strengthens once more his total freedom to subvert as he feels like it, and to question radically both technique and content. He requests the viewer to apply a continuous and immediate visual gymnastic. Moreover, the canons he chooses are sometimes modified within the same painting. In this way he avoids appearing obvious or univocal.
From 2003 onwards the artist enjoys himself with a rather unusual support; he uses prefabricated undulated panels. The waves of the background modify or reinforce the subjects, distorting the perspective and forcing the artist to keep this in mind and to correct it. His 'Football ground' (2003), made of a homogeneous green background on which he has traced the borderlines of the playing areas, is by itself an example of non-painting in its technical simplicity, but the three-dimensional support suggests movement even in such a still geometry.
Wang Xingwei's way of proceeding is becoming more and more complex and articulate like in some mathematic system of variations on a theme: even within a pictorial series, for instance, the relations between the different paintings are not so clear, rather they work with different references (the use of a special colour, i.e. green, or the existence of analogies amongst the subjects, like the penguin and the panda) which link two or more paintings.Even though he has never painted anything abstract, and he perceives abstraction as something strange to him, the artist in reality is probably closer to it than others. His interpretation of figuration is now so far from its narrative function, while on the other side it never really acknowledged the aesthetic one.
We can say that subjects and techniques, colours and images, are deprived of their original meaning and re-dressed with different functions, which are not fixed by the artist, but left, like in a never-ending rebus, for individual interpretation. The viewer can enjoy figuring out all the layers of intellectual complexity and obscure quotations, or feel content with an uncommon or audaciously tautological visual feeling.
Source: www.galerieursmeile.com
By Monica Dematte, Shanghai, September 2004
"Large Rowboat" is not a Group Show
In Chinese traditional literature, quite often poems were simply named after the first of a stream of emotional images evoked by the first line of the text. Similarly, a specific work by Shanghai-based painter Wang Xingwei lends the title to the show Wang Xingwei - Large Rowboat at Galerie Urs Meile (Beijing, February 3 - March 31, 2007; Lucerne, May 12 - June 30, 2007). Although not the earliest of the exhibited paintings, Large Rowboat (2006) is the first of Wang's most recent works that marks a further technical and conceptual turning point in the artist's chameleonic production.
At a first sight Wang Xingwei could be taken for anyone: he could be Ingres, Kandinsky, Duchamp, de Lempicka, just to quote some names; he could as well be a surrealist, a photorealist, an illustrator, or even an art forger. Wang Xingwei exploits different cultural references and incisively combines them with an outstanding ability to exploit diverse pictorial techniques to which he resorts ad hoc when shrewdly sifting through the history of art. As painter Xie Nanxing says of him:
"Wang Xingwei reminds me of those master workers in the old factories from times gone by, who were able to create something new by assembling pieces coming from different old machines, just depending on the function they wanted the newly made tool to have."1)
Wang Xingwei plays hide-and-seek with the viewer, concealing himself behind a large company of characters that he revives from various historical and cultural references: art history, classical novels, placards, or from his own mind, as in the case of the weird gang of penguins and pandas reappearing from time to time in the artist's paintings (see, for instance, Death of Panda, 2004, a work inspired to Giotto's fresco painting The Lamentation, 1305-06 A.D.). Wang provokes, flabbergasts and intrigues viewers with his irresistible and colourful symbolic gimmicks, with the uniforms and other paraphernalia through which the same man and woman suddenly change their identities, becoming surreal golfers, sailors, hostesses, disquieting nurses and who knows what else in the future.
Other times, as in a number of Wang's latest works, starting with Large Rowboat, the two represented subjects are not only stripped of any professional attire, but also deprived of detailed facial features. Quickly sketched, cartoon-like geometric silhouettes outline the unsophisticated figures of a man and a woman, seemingly a couple. "I want to slowly depart from art history," Wang Xingwei explains. "In the past the observer needed to have a [certain] cultural background [to understand my works], while what I am dealing with now has a more direct connection with anyone's personal experience. [In my latest paintings] I built formal models to create shapes. I want to simplify the form, and I find sketching a very comfortable way of expression."2)
Among the fourteen paintings featured in the exhibition, Legend of the White Snake (2006) is an example of Wang Xingwei's recent work that is both technically and conceptually closer to those earlier paintings by the artist that are linked to art history and literature. Borrowing style and composition from The Two Friends (Perspective) (1923) by Tamara de Lempicka, Wang Xingwei reinterprets, emphasizes and openly displays the sexual hints that are the hallmark of the famous Art Deco works of the Hungarian-born, American painter.
Legend of the White Snake is inspired by the classical Chinese novel of the same name, a tale dating back to the Tang Dynasty (618 A.D.) that became a complete book during the Ming Dynasty (1318 - 1645 A.D.). The novel recounts the undying love story of Xu Xian and Lady White (Bai Suzhen), a snake spirit who turned its appearance into a beautiful woman. By conferring onto the snake a highly erotic/destructive symbolism, Wang Xingwei's painting reminds one of the lasciviously fatal relationship between Ximen Qing and his concubine Golden Lotus (Pan Jinlian) narrated in the Ming Dynasty novel Jin Ping Mei (see Wang Xingwei's Death of Ximen, 2002). While in Wang Xingwei's Death of Ximen (2002), the male protagonist of the Chinese erotic classic is portrayed alone, dead in bed, still suffering from the lethal erection caused by an overdose of drugs provided by Golden Lotus, in Legend of the White Snake, Xu Xian lies enraptured in a huge cobra's coils, which wrap around his body and penis.
Untitled (Nurse Hugging A Tree), 2006, is a painting dominated by the penetrating and enigmatic eyes of a nurse staring at the white birch trunk she is hugging. If this work takes up again the same elements of 2005's untitled (Nurse and Trees)-the nurse, the white birch trunks and an autumnal forest in the background-now it is through the nurse's embrace (an extreme attempt to connect to something organic) that a more directly physical relation between the portrayed subjects is shown. In the painting, the human and vegetable universes seem to reach a hybrid state of interchangeability. Untitled (Nurse Hugging A Tree) also differs from the veiled, sensual allusions intrinsic to Chinese traditional ink-and-wash painting, which are far less direct in their sexual references. Instead, Wang has emphasized an array of contradictory but suggestive signals: the gnarled and tapering hands of the nurse, which somehow recall the thin and knotty trunk; the colours of the leaves and the facial traits of the woman, suggesting full maturity / the beginning of life's decline; the affected composure of the lady in her social/professional role, betrayed by her ambiguous gaze at the bole; the yellow ground, reminiscent of a sense of aridity and at the same time sexual desire ('yellow'-in Chinese huangse-also means 'pornographic').
In Untitled (Nurse Hugging A Tree), different shades of the subject's complex psychology, such as loneliness, aggressiveness, sense of duty, frustration, and sexual drive all emerge in a solitary moment. Analogously, in the more caricature-like untitled (Man Hugging a Tree) and untitled (Man Hugging a Mushroom), both realized in 2006, the tree and the mushroom are not only substitutions of the object of desire, but also symbolize a self-complacent, enhanced and distorted phallic vision that arouses hilarity. Like single panel comics whose colours suggest an underexposed and an overexposed picture respectively, in the two aforementioned paintings the dark or overly bright human figures are identifiable only as male, the details obscured by the artist's use of light.
Following a tradition that makes Shanghai the cradle of Chinese comics since the 1920s, the source material for Wang Xingwei's Large Rowboat (200 x 260 cm, 2006), Medium Rowboat (120 x 160 cm, 2006) and Small Rowboat (100 x 120 cm, 2006) comes from an illustration the artist found in a local newspaper and adapted for his canvasses. Wang's newest works went through a process of radical formal and chromatic simplification and abstraction that makes them quite different from his almost photorealistic paintings of the mid-1990s. On this point the artist comments, "You can never go back to the innocence of children's drawings. Even form and colour cannot be forgetful of the logic and techniques in which you were trained."3)
Once more dealing with human relationships-and, above all, relationships between the opposite sexes-the topic tackled in the works of this period bring back to mind, by comparison, some of the first canvasses by the artist such as: All Happy Families Are Similar-1 (1994), All Happy Families Are Similar-2 (1994), My Beautiful Life (1993-95), Dawn (1994). By that time, some very private scenes of a couple's life- episodes of family violence, for example-had already appeared in Wang Xingwei's paintings.
Deep Deep Water (2002) is another of Wang Xingwei's works that, because of the style and the subjects-now a man and a schoolgirl in a rowboat-gets closer to the artist's current creations. Offering social commentary on today's society, Wang Xingwei's subjects suffer from a latent inability to fully experience a love relationship. Behind the polished public façade built on the rules of standardized education, the figures are shrouded in emotional isolation. With their thoughtful expressions, for example, the subjects of the three painting connected to the rowboat do not share the pleasure of sitting next to each other: in a kind of excess of diligence, the man absurdly pushes the boat while standing behind it, his effort to rhythmically row with his partner turns out to be completely unsuitable and bizarre. In Duck-Shaped Boat (2006) the two subjects (presumably lovers) sit in two different small boats and seem to enjoy themselves individually. While the man pilots a cartoon-like Mandarin duck-shaped boat (in China, a pair of mandarin ducks, which mate for life, are the symbol of eternal love and marriage), the woman takes the wheel of a fashionable pink car-shaped boat, and drifts another direction. To Wang Xingwei, some contemporary couple's relationships can likened to the impossible difficulty of playing golf in the desert, as suggested in untitled (Woman Pulling A Man) (2006). In this painting, a woman pulls her partner (a fully equipped male golfer sitting in a wheelbarrow) around a desert landscape, as if she was a rickshaw runner.
When first seeing a monographic catalogue or a one-man show by Wang Xingwei, one could mistake the paintings for a collection of works by diverse artists. This is because, besides shifting from one style to the other, Wang keeps simultaneously developing different trends and variations around independent scenes which are disjointed from any time and cause/effect, a priori rational and narrative succession. Even if Wang's paintings could be grouped in generic series following certain styles or topics, whether belonging to the same period or dating back to dissimilar creative moments, the artist leaves the task of ordering and connecting the works to the viewer's own discretion. Under Wang Xingwei's direction, the subjects are caught in ridiculous and/or helpless circumstances, purposely staged in order to break the acknowledged rules of logical thinking. Beyond the initial laugh or astonishment, the viewer starts creating new associations through which the real nature of Wang Xingwei's works reveals itself. Like burlesque snapshots, Wang's paintings show and question conflicting aspects peculiar to the tragicomic experience of life, an unfathomable condition that has repeated itself from time immemorial.
Source: www.galerieursmeile.com
By Nataline Colonnello, Beijing
January 13, 2007
The Bad and Beautiful Paintings
Wang Xingwei is undoubtedly a good painter. Without considering his nationality, we can almost place him in the league of such "bad painters" as Martin Kippenberger that made good art by flaunting outrageous taste and sardonic content. True to the nature of "bad paintings", Wang is prone to depicting scenes that are ambiguous, irrelevant, absurd, vulgar, scandalous and laughable. A hole-in-the-wall hair salon lit in dim pink light, a woman whose kimono torn wide open in the lower end and hands tied in the back, sitting on the floor, across from a well-dressed man sitting indifferently in a sofa, a group of penguins standing around and looking at a panda lying on the ground, an air hostess suspended from a tree on the edge of a cliff, a seaman standing in the middle of a small pool with a life buoy around his waist with the pool water barely up to his knees, a nurse dressed in a sexy body-hugging uniform and black high heels sitting in a black sofa staring aggressively ahead. The plots are often unexpected, clearly far-fetched and non-existent, yet charmingly surreal and deliciously juicy. If Wang Xingwei were a fiction writer, he would write damn good stories even though none of them would sound convincing.
In the early phase of his career, Wang Xingwei lived in the small city of Haicheng in the harsh climate of north China, yet he drew freely from an extensive mixture of classical and popular art-historical sources, kitsch and traditional images, archetypal and personal fantasies. In his paintings, the artist mixed his source materials with gusto as well as a heavy doze of dark humor. There existed great disparities between what people imagined of his life in Haicheng - he had a quiet family life with his wife and son, teaching and painting, and how he fantasized his own world and the world around him in his paintings - he appeared again and again on canvas as a scolding father, a burglar in the act of breaking open a door, or Chairman Mao.
Actually, you don't really need to be a historian or an art expert to be attracted by Wang Xingwei's paintings. The attraction is both instant and long-lasting. And you wonder why. While the artist dutifully fulfills the expectation of his audience by sustaining a narrative aspect in his work, it belies his well-designed aesthetic. His construction is perfect, both balanced and harmonious. Yes, harmonious, a quality that evokes Renaissance Art, in which pictorial composition played an important role. "Construction is the synthesis of the manifold at the expense of the qualitatively different moments that come under its sway, and also at the expense of the subject that sacrifices itself while accomplishing the synthesis."1) It's the synthesis that the artist has arrived at and that what you are staring into. Forget about the content. You like his paintings because they simply have a "good" look.
The figurative elements in Wang Xingwei's paintings, which are torn from their original context, become "the aesthetic subject". The artist thus gains ultimate freedom in choosing what goes into his paintings: historical figures, seaman, nurses, soldiers, scenes from fairy tales, penguins, pandas, a manhole, a landful of watermelons, anything goes, as long as Wang sees them fit into his narrative and formal fabrications. Although his early output made asides to recognizable images, anecdotes, events and famous works from the Western art history, which made itself susceptible to easy reading, he's since moved further and further away from this accountable source, and instead uninhibitedly invents scenarios and plots completely from the thin air. It's almost hopeless to identify a unifying theme in each stage of his production and it's equally impossible and meaningless to predict what he will depict next. "Construction is the vehicle whereby art can, under its own steam, move beyond its nominalistic and contingent situation towards some over-arching validity, call it universality."2) Don't even bother to work out what the artist wants to convey through his paintings. "By paring down the elements, the reductive moment of construction tends to diminish their potency to the point where a victory over them is an all-too-easy triumph."3
His style slides among realism, expressionism, constructivism, comic strip and caricature. He takes meticulous efforts and precision also to visualize the settings in each of his paintings, a strategy that enriches their pictorial content and heightens the overall visual appeal. While contributing to the story-telling of his paintings, the details in the backgrounds are an important formal vehicle through which the artist arrives at his vision of a perfect painting.
It seems that the artist is forever driven subconsciously by a longing for a kind of classic and timeless quality in his work. Let's not overlook the fact that Wang Xingwei, born in 1969, spent his formative years in the idealistic 80s in China. It was a time when after the former decades of complete rejection and erasure of intellectuality, Chinese intellectuals were eager to reestablish their elitist position in the society. The country was recovering from the political turmoil and economic stagnation of the previous years. As the social climate became relaxed and open again, the population was searching for spiritual guidance and role models. Could intellectuals take such a lead? How could they step up into such a role? They must formally ascertain their authority again and install among the general public a respect for formality and intellectuality. For instance, to reassert the appeal of visual art, the classical and enduring aesthetic quality could guarantee elicit sensual empathy and convert believers. It was almost more important to comply with than to defy such conventional aesthetic standards.
Wang Xingwei's prolific practice took off in the mid and late 1990s. At that time, Chinese contemporary art world has been through the conceptually charged 85 Movement where Chinese artists had a crash course in and actively experimented with Western modernist art forms, the "new generation" of painters who emerged in the early 90s, took their subject matters from their immediate reality and visualized them in their works with great precision, the political pop and cynical realism artists who thrived in poking fun and offering critique of the political history and reality of China, the kitschy art that celebrated vernacular and folk aesthetics, and the rise of conceptual photography that portrayed the reality in a highly postmodern fashion. While geographically removed from the epic centers of all these movements, which tended to take place in major coastal and inland cities, Wang Xingwei wasn't immune to their influences. Yet it was impossible to categorize him according to any of these genres.
Wang was someone who emerged in the transitory period in Chinese art history when artists were shifting their focus from being socially and politically engaged to an inward gaze into their personal world. What Wang Xingwei's works corresponded to, however, was a growing awareness among a younger generation of contemporary artists, of the everyday life instead of the society at large or the political reality. As the country was steered onto a track of fast economic development and drastically improved living conditions, individual beings were given more weight. The emergence of conceptual photography and video art around this time also enabled artists to look more closely into their microscopic existence and the everyday for inspirations and basis for their creations. Domestic scenes and personal fantasies in Wang Xingwei's paintings fed into such a fascination and appealed to many.
Since 2002, Wang Xingwei was relocated to the southern city of Shanghai, deliberately placing himself into a completely different cityscape with an equally foreign dialect and life style unfamiliar to him. The explosive commodity culture and gentle climate of Shanghai brought new stylistic possibilities (he experimented with painting on corrugated boards and bright colors) and subject matters (there were depictions of colorful flowers, romantic scenes and portraits of Michael Jackson, for instance) into his works. Recently he moved again, his entire family to Beijing, exposing himself to another radically different cityscape and way of living. While his aesthetic instinct continues to rule his canvases, we are looking forward to the stimulation of a new everyday life to reveal itself in his practice.
Source: www.galerieursmeile.com
Published by Routledge, 1984
