Beijing
Wang Xingwei: Large Rowboat
Galerie Urs Meile Beijing-Lucerne

Wang Xingwei’s latest painting exhibition at Urs Meile in Beijing has aroused enough excitement to lure back detractors of the medium who feel that artistic value is overshadowed by skyrocketing market values. Named after the working title of one of his paintings, “Large Rowboat” hews to a minimalistic exhibition design that maximizes the works’ visual impact. The gallery built partitions throughout its two rooms to provide each painting with independent wall space and to guide visitors through the exhibition.

This exhibition also marked a significant departure from an artistic practice already notable for bold reinvention. Wang attained stardom in the 1990s by recycling recognizable icons and imagery from art and cultural histories, weaving his own portraits and life scenarios into the international visual canon. A skilled draughtsman, Wang deliberately gave these classics a rugged look and dark mood.

Since 2002, his paintings have featured bright colors and thematic content ranging from flowers to pandas, a soccer field, a bridge and a hair salon, some on canvas and others on corrugated board. Critics attributed this drastic change in style and mood to his relocation from the small town of Haicheng in northeast China to the warmer climate and urban conveniences of Shanghai.

However, Wang has since reintroduced narrative elements into his works, portraying contemporary Chinese characters such as a nurse, air stewardess or soldier, cropped form the naval with glaring eyes and angry expressions. The 14 paintings in this exhibition develop the narrative elements further, with the characters simplified to resemble comic strip figures with abstract identities. Wang places them as couples or individually in postures and settings suggestive of first love and sexual tension or fraught with isolation and frustration. One painting shows a man barking at a mushroom, another has a couple forming a heart shape by holding their hands together.

It’s hard to decide what is more intriguing in this series of work, their content or their style, which makes apparent and ingenious reference to a whole range of movements and genres in art history, including cartoon illustration, hard-edge painting and constructivism. Nor is it possible to detect any single thread running through these funny, fantastic images. Indeed, for the artist, the content is apparently a means to display the painting techniques he’s mastered, while the rest is nothing more than a good joke.

- Carol Lu