We are pleased to present Xiyao Wang’s first exhibition at the gallery. The young, Berlin-based Chinese artist creates large-scale, immersive paintings in which gestural lines evoke echoes of landscapes, bodies, movements, thoughts. The Crystalline Moon Palace, the title of her exhibition, borrowed from a series of paintings in the show, refers to an ancient Chinese myth around the moon goddess Chang’e.
In the process, Xiyao Wang develops a kind of hybrid abstract painting that combines various influences and inspirations: Taoism and post-structuralism, ancient Chinese pictorial traditions, bodywork, dance, martial arts, and the canon of Western art history. In her work, mythologies and the lyrical, hermetic painting of Cy Twombly merge with global mass culture, electronic music, with the networked, media-influenced thinking of millennials and Gen Z. Xiyao’s paintings explore inner visions, bodily perceptions, sensations, feelings, interrogating her East-West biography. In doing so, they always reflect very precise formal aspects and certain currents in the history of painting.
Xiyao, who studied with Werner Büttner and Anselm Reyle, is interested besides Twombly in German painters such as Günther Förg and Albert Oehlen. In the practice of all these painters the line plays a crucial role, through the “eccentric,” in some cases calligraphic ductus, the tension between reduced clarity and affect-laden chaos. But Xiyao Wang is not concerned with picking up where lyrical abstraction and Abstract Expressionism left off, nor with a female remake of the German, maledominated painting of the 1980s and 1990s. Rather, she deals with the question of how to create abstract and bold pictorial spaces today with similarly reduced means.
The vision of flying, of intense physical and emotional states, of weightlessness, liberation, and dissolution of boundaries is the essential starting point for the construction of Xiyao Wang’s expressive pictorial spaces, reduced to color, gesture, and lines. Although nonrepresentational, they conjure up abstract landscapes, neural pathways, fragmented afterimages of flowering or dying plants, animal or human bodies, traces of dance, struggle, search and thought processes. The experience they convey is paradoxical: disembodied and transcendent, yet at the same time exhilaratingly sensual, material, almost tangible.
"I have never gone back down a path, never returned anywhere out of fear. I have to endure a situation until it ends."
Again and again, Xiyao, who practices kickboxing, ballet, tango, and all manner of sports, has emphasized the physical aspect of her painting. In her gigantic, over 68 meter wide polyptych River, River, Could You Tell Me The Story Of My Hometown (2022), one can see how the artist relates physically, with her entire body, to the canvas. The techniques she chooses, the priming of the background with quick-drying acrylic paints, the use of oil pencils that react almost like drawings or calligraphy to painting executed with a brush, require speed and spontaneity, intuitive, even risky painterly decisions. Of course, connections can be seen in Xiyao’s painting to Abstract Expressionism, and there are references to Action Painting, Informel, and Tachism.
Xiyao’s paintings, on the other hand, despite their expressive power, are more like meditations on events, life experiences, perceptions—and above all on the nature of painting itself. She refers to the thinking behind classical Chinese landscape painting, to painters and theorists influenced by Taoism, including Guo Xi (1020-1090), who attributed animated qualities to landscapes, mountains, and rivers and saw painting as far more than just a medium that captures things in pictures.
Xiyao’s paintings are influenced by her profound knowledge of Eastern and Western painting history, as well as by the digital, hybrid image culture of the twenty-first century. Especially in view of the current geopolitical crises, this loss triggers existential fears and longings, the desire for a sort of return to an earlier, orderly state in which conditions were still “normal.” But Xiyao finds freedom in her painting in the exact opposite—in an acceptance of this longing for myths, for authenticity, yet with the simultaneous certainty that there is no way back. Her paintings are akin to echo chambers in which voices and times overlap: They reflect reflections on painting, convey perceptions of perceptions.
Born in 1992 in Chongqing, China
Lives and works in Berlin, Germany
The Berlin-based Chinese artist creates large-scale, immersive paintings in which gestural lines evoke echoes of landscapes, bodies, movements, thoughts. In the process, she develops a kind of hybrid abstract painting that combines various influences and inspirations: Taoism and post-structuralism, ancient Chinese pictorial traditions, bodywork, dance, martial arts, and the canon of Western art history. In her work, mythologies and the lyrical, hermetic painting of Cy Twombly merge with global mass culture, electronic music, with the networked, media-influenced thinking of millennials and Gen Z. Xiyao’s paintings explore inner visions, bodily perceptions, sensations, feelings, interrogating her East-West biography.
More about the artist
