XIYAO WANG: DO YOU HEAR THE WATERFALL?
Perrotin announces an exhibition of new works by China-born and Germany-based artist, Xiyao Wang, her first solo show in The United States. Wang is known for her immersive paintings in which gestural lines evoke landscapes, bodies, movements, and thoughts.
January 12 – February 17, 2024
With swooping lines and a unique perspective, the movement in Wang’s paintings creates the illusion of ever-expanding spatial relationships. Drawing on her knowledge of both classical Chinese mountain-and-sea scrolls and the minimalism of Cy Twombly, these artworks appear to grow larger upon each viewing. While this effect is certainly within the tradition of Chinese painting, Wang invents her own interpretation of calligraphic gestures, using paint, charcoal, and oil sticks. Wang’s presence is visible in these gestural strokes like a shadow of a dancer moving behind a screen.
Wang painted two large-scale works. In Zhuangzi Dreaming of Becoming a Butterfly No. 2, Wang’s own calligraphic notation system guides viewers physically from left to right, back and forth to interact from several perspectives. Its partner, The Butterfly Dreaming of Becoming Zhuangzi No. 1, embraces color to punctuate the charcoal strokes as if looking at a dream in a parallel universe.
“Am I a Chinese artist who wakes up in Berlin, or am I a Berlin artist, dreaming I am in China?” This is a question that so many of her generation, born in China but educated and living in the West, must ask themselves. Being in Germany for almost one decade has made Wang keenly homesick for her family and culture. She shifted her interests from kickboxing and techno-music to lessons on the Guqin, the stringed instrument whose distinctive sound is a tool for meditation. A Chinese culture that was everywhere in her childhood, rendering it invisible, came into clear focus only when she was far from home.
Do you hear the waterfall? No.1, 2023, the painting for which the exhibition is named, hums with the white noise of an out-of-control waterway, using arcs of charcoal lines on primed canvas. Of course, we cannot “hear” but we are moved to listen.
Sound, music, and silent meditation are influences on this artist who practices yoga, kickboxing, ballet, and sitting. It is telling that when she was a child, Wang wanted to be a dancer, but her father, himself an artist, informed her that dancers have short careers while artists can work throughout their lives and be remembered even in death. Her gestural lyricism performs as a song against a whispering soundtrack.
It would be too easy to label this work “a bridge between East and West,” as if Wang’s innovations were merely a matter of cut-and-paste. That would ignore the synthesis of transnational influences, particularly global abstraction, now readily available to artists of this generation.