W Wan Zhenyu (1979) Wan (also known as Li Cheng) graduated from Beijing Institute of Graphic Communication in 2005. Since then, he's had several group exhibition and his first solo show took place at Art Seasons, Beijing in 2011. The show, "Future Supreme", was very well received and has earned him critical acclaim. Wan's oeuvre is characterised by lively, futuristic imagery juxtaposed with realistic figures. "Unconscious creation" is a key feature of his works - Wan arranges realistic images within fantasy spaces to create a visual experience that is oddly familiar yet surreal. Wang Du (1956) Wang is a contemporary Chinese artist who focuses on threedimensional painted objects. Traditionally trained in Guangzhou, he now lives and has his studio in Paris. His works show strong influences of contemporary Western art and culture, and represent his own notions of modernity and development, and his personal relationship with both China and the West. His latest works have turned to large-scale sculptures representing crumpled up newspaper, either en masse in trash cans, buildings or other repositories, or individually, in giant exploded versions of ordinary, everyday trash. Wang Gongxin (1960) Today, Wang is one of China's most respected video artists. Wang made his first video, "The Brooklyn Sky"(1995) as part of an installation he set up inside his Beijing courtyard home. Playing on an American saying that if you dig deep enough you will reach China, the piece expressed Wang's nostalgia for Brooklyn, but also suggested a new exchange of information between China and the West. While Zhang Peili was the earliest pioneer of video art in China, Wang was instrumental in advancing the movement in China. "Wang Gongxin brought two things to Chinese contemporary art," says Pi Li, renowned Beijing-based art critic. "The first is that he emphasized technique. And the second thing he brought was a logical method for bringing a concept into reality." Wang Guangle (1976) "If I am to paint, I will paint the passage of time itself…which concerns the essence of my life." According to Wang, people in northen Fujian used to buy a coffin when they turned 60. They kept it at home and each year painted it with red lacquer to celebrate their survival and remind them of their impending death. Each year they’d add another layer, until they died. As a child, he saw his grandfather painting his coffin, and the memory inspired his Coffin Paint series. Wang Jianwei (1958) After receiving his master's degree in oil painting at the Zhejiang Academy of Fine Arts and developing a career as a painter, Wang shifted his practice to performance works, video installations, playwriting, and documentary filmmaking. He applies an anthropological method to his work through which he builds a visual inventory of Chinese urban society and its evolution. Wang's documentaries are considered, skeptical reviews of microlocal phenomena, such as the increasingly brutal effects of contemporary urban development in Chinese metropolitan centers. In 1997, Wang was the first Chinese artist to participate in Documenta in Kassel, Germany. Wang Jin (1962) Wang is is a skillful photographer, sculptor and performance artist. His works are filled with social commentary. In Henan province he created huge blocks of ice and placed toys and consumer goods inside -- allowing residents to hammer and chisel away in a mad frenzy that said something about the consumer madness sweeping China. He has also sculpted huge porcelain bones and manufactured ancient Chinese clothing with modern techniques and materials. Much of his work defies easy explanation or categorization, except to say it is provocative. Wang studied Chinese painting at Zhejiang Academy of fine arts and graduated in 1987. He lives and works in Beijing now. Wang Keping (1949) Wang is one of China's pioneering artists. Wang was a member of the experimental Stars Group of artists that formed in 1979, breaking with China's propaganda art and setting the stage for avant-garde art in China. Huang Rui and Ai Wei Wei were also members. Wang's unique wooden sculptures, including one that featured a Buddha like Mao figure, shocked the art world in Beijing. Today Wang lives in Paris and continues to work in wood. His figures are of a powerful vividness, although they also have a touch of melancholy. In one string of his work, Wang is particularly interested in exploring and negotiating the possibilities of how to artistically render the female body. Visually informed by an amalgam of prehistoric ice-age statuettes and 20th century artists like Constantin Brancusi, his preference is for exaggerated proportions. Wang Qingsong (1966) Wang first won recognition as a painter in the mid-1990s through his membership in the Gaudy Art group, a movement influenced by the work of Jeff Koons and championed by China’s most influential art critic, Li Xianting. Since turning from painting to photography in the late 1990s, Beijing-based artist Wang has created compelling works that convey an ironic vision of 21stcentury China’s encounter with global consumer culture. Working in the manner of a motion-picture director, he conceives elaborate scenarios involving dozens of models that are staged on film studio sets. The resulting color photographs employ knowing references to classic Chinese artworks to throw an unexpected light on today’s China, emphasizing its new material wealth, its uninhibited embrace of commercial values, and the social tensions arising from the massive influx of migrant workers to its cities. Wang Sishun (1979) A graduate of Beijing's Central Academy of Art (Sculpture), Wang's oeuvre traverses a variery of media, most notably sculpture, installation, and video. Having spent 8 years training in sculpture has given the artist a special affinity towards spatial relations, materials and a panoramic ability to solve problems as they arise. For Wang, the figure is simply a symbol and measurement in his work. Time represents the "un-ending of creation and destruction of desires". The notion of time plays a significant role in Wang's works - "I like the vectorial feeling of time, it is like standing at any one point on a timeline where everything close seems small and everything large seems even larger." Wang has exhibited extensively since 2006, with several solo shows in Beijing, Shanghai, Vienna and most recently in Paris. Wang Tianxuan (1984) Belonging to the latest generation of painters to emerge from China, Wang studied at Luxun Academy of Art, under the mentorship of renowned artists including Li Dafang and Gong Ligong. Wang has held a number of exhibitions around China and many of his works demonstrate his personal fascination with Buddhism. Wang Xiaoshuang (1991) Wang graduated from Xian Academy of Fine Arts in 2013. Currently working and living in Shanghai, Wang's paintings express his criticism of urbanisation and the growing pollution in the city. Using thick brushstrokes, he depicts the congested nature of Shanghai's city life. Wang received the Young Artist Award in 2013 and was also commended with the Poly "New Force" award by Artron in 2014. Wang Xingwei (1969) Wang is a well regarded painter known for his continuous bold reinvention of styles and clever techniques. 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. Wang has recently reintroduced narrative elements into his works, portraying contemporary Chinese professionals such as a nurse or soldier, with glaring eyes and angry expressions. His latest series of works makes apparent and ingenious reference to a whole range of movements and genres in art history, including cartoon illustration, hard-edge painting and constructivism. Wang Yi (1991) Wang graduated from the Oil Painting Department of the China Academy of Art in 2013. Despite his youth, Wang has already participated in a number of exhibitions in China. His work has also been exhibited at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, USA. Following Shanghai's tradition of abstract painting, Wang's oeuvre is purely abstract, exploring the effects of colour and optics. Wang Yuyang (1979) One of the leading new media artists working in Beijing, Wang regards technology as his primary medium. “I am curious about how machines are made...I want to see the hope and life in ordinary objects, to make them breathe so the whole world will breathe with us.” His works, which range from highly conceptual installations to paintings, photography and video, explore the traditional Chinese philosophy of yin/yang, the relationship between 0 and 1, black and white, on and off. Over the years, Wang's works have been exhibited in musems and triennials in China and Europe.
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