Wang Yuyang: Painting

2024

Wang Yuyang developed his passion for painting at an early age, starting with traditional Chinese painting. He later studied realist oil painting under the guidance of Zheng Yi and was admitted to the High School Affiliated with the Central Academy of Fine Arts to continue his artistic training. During this time, driven by curiosity and youthful rebellion, Wang briefly stepped away from painting to study theater at the Central Academy of Drama. He then began exploring contemporary Chinese art through various mediums, including performance, video, and installation.

In 2015, Wang Yuyang held a major solo exhibition, “Tonight, I Shall Meditate On That Which I Am,” at the Long Museum (West Bund). The show featured over 30 installation works created over the past decade, spanning all three floors of the museum and offering a comprehensive look at the different stages of his artistic practice. Exhibitions of this scale have been rare at the Long Museum since. While Wang has continued to hold solo exhibitions at museums in China and abroad, much of the work in these shows has built on concepts from his earlier series.

Since 2021, Wang Yuyang has been exploring new conceptual directions. Earlier this year, his solo exhibition “Chaosmosis” at the Shenzhen Art Museum examined the social landscape shaped by science and technology. The show featured technologies such as artificial intelligence, virtual reality, autonomous driving, robotics, geological exploration, synthetic biology, big data, and the Internet of Things. It examined the interplay between humans, artificial objects, synthetic life, and the natural world, constructing new subjects and narratives that challenge and critique the dominant framework of anthropocentrism.

The exhibition “Wang Yuyang: Painting” showcases a fresh exploration and reorganization of the artist’s decade-long painting practice. Since 2010, Wang has sought to revisit his passion for painting through the lens of new media. However, past exhibitions have only presented this practice as fragments of his broader artistic endeavors. Much like his work in other mediums, Wang’s approach to painting is fluid, with complex languages and ideas that both deconstruct and subvert traditional painting, resulting in contemporary images that blend the human, non-human, and natural worlds. The themes explored in his works include the deconstruction and representation of light, the extension and layering of time, the creation and destruction of machines, and the thresholds and migrations of artificial nature. In essence, “Wang Yuyang: Painting” reflects the artist’s anxieties and critical reflections on traditional artistic media within the context of a “human-technology-nature” environment, while also conveying his enduring love for painting as an expression rooted in the essence of life.