Wang Xuan

Wang Xuan, born in 1979 in the province of Guangxi, China, creates in his small to medium-sized works his very own world of images. With great painterly precision, set-like individual elements are combined into still-life-like pictorial spaces, in which the painter fuses surrealistic images with objects from European and Asian art history to create im- imaginative works of art.

What appears at first glance to be an arbitrary collection of individual objects, on closer inspection turns out to be a finely worked out, thoroughly planned composition, in which individual elements of different origins merge into one picture. Figures and faces reminiscent of the Van Eyck brothers’ inventions, draped fabrics, like curtains or veils, elements from architectural and landscape painting. There are also mundane everyday objects, such as an old enamel bathtub, flower vases, loaves of bread or oyster shells, as well as flowers ore plants, animals, and mask-like monsters.

The perfect technical implementation of painting is a targeted means to an end, it is broken by blurring and distortion, by reflections and optical illusions. Often it is also small dots of color, orange or yellow-filled circles that distract the viewer’s gaze and subtly bring the work out of the balance borrowed from a classic image composition. These distractions allow the viewer to experience the image as an image, as a miniature world unfolding on the surface of the paper with a brush, pencil, and acrylic paint, which opens up to the viewer like a window in a diorama. Spatial space in general: Often spatiality is indicated by limitations or actually executed as painted architecture in which Xuan Wang’s paintings unfold.