Dynamicity, corporeality and the idea of the image as a space are the tri-pole between which Xiyao Wang's practice oscillates and evolves. All three are classical themes of Chinese landscape painting, in the case of image space concepts at least since Guo Xi (active around 1060 - 1090 AD), painter and art theorist of the Northern Song dynasty, according to whom paintings were meant to convey to the viewer the impression of actually being transported into the depicted imaginary landscape.
Variants of the same themes have also been among the most productive in modern Western, especially post-war, art - obvious examples ranging from Yves Klein's Anthropométries to Drip and Action Painting and, today, the artistic use of virtual spaces.
In earlier series by Xiyao Wang, slow-drying oil paint played a major role in the layered build-up of her works, a medium that demands patience and allows brush strokes and colours to flow and transition into each other. The immediacy of the imaging process is interrupted while the oil paint layer settles but, simultaneously, the corporeality of the surface structures increases. The new, predominantly acrylic and oil stick-based paintings shown here are a much more direct reflection of the artist's very dynamic painting style: the brush acting as an extension of her body, each brushstroke now becomes a precise trace of her constant movement in front of and between the canvases in her atelier.
The works themselves are repeatedly turned and sometimes placed on the floor horizontally during this process. Because of the type of media utilized, the resulting clusters in the foreground exhibit hardly any post-application paint flow. They are raw, fast, calligraphic. Their colours modern, unmixed and clear.
At the same time, as in much of traditional Chinese landscape painting as well as in the artist's earlier work, the image space is given depth by low-contrast backgrounds in lighter pastel shades, the palette toned down in intensity with white - a combination that creates an emblematic, more self-assuredly urban aesthetic than in her earlier paintings. A space that no longer evokes the nostalgia of natural shapes but whose structure is reminiscent of tagged-up walls or false colour representations of semi-random dynamic systems. In Xiyao Wang's new works, one is no longer transported into an ideal landscape of southern China, but rather flying through a Brownian dance of colour particles against an evening sky glimpsed between the high-rises of contemporary Berlin.
Xiyao Wang has had solo exhibitions at Turnweg Gallery (2016), Paul Roosen Contemporary (2019), Soy Capitán Gallery (2019), A Thousand Plateaus Gallery, Chengdu (2020), and, earlier this year, a widely acclaimed MISA presentation at Koenig Gallery in Berlin.
