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18/5/2013

Wang Xingwei

Ullens Center for Contemporary Art UCCA, Beijing

“Wang Xingwei” represents the culmination of a long collaboration between UCCA and the artist. One of the original artists to enter the collection of the Fondation Guy &MyriamUllens, Wang worked last year on the final episode in UCCA’s “Curated By…” series, producing an exhibition of seven young painters whose work explored similar themes to his own. Wang also has a painting on view in the concurrent exhibition “DUCHAMP and/or/in CHINA,” which positions one of Wang’s artistic heroes in relation to the Chinese scene.

In bringing together Wang’s key achievements of the first two decades of his career, this exhibition will contribute significantly to the reassessment and elevation of a key figure in contemporary Chinese art, who through the complexity of his vision proves the depth and richness of the tradition to which he belongs.

ABOUT THE ARTIST
“I see the artist as a postman, delivering letters. He should not be overly curious about what is inside the envelopes.”

Born in an industrial city in northeastern China’s Liaoning Province to an ordinary family, Wang Xingwei is an unlikely hero of the Chinese avant-garde. His early training in figurative painting at Shenyang Normal University, a provincial teachers’ college, left him alone and isolated in his native city. Growing up amidst the ’85 New Wave period, a time when Chinese contemporary art was embracing the foreign and conceptual, Wang was subject to a pedagogy that had not been revised according to these trends. But rather than eschew the formal models offered him by the system, Wang has maintained a critical dialogue with his own history by using the techniques he was trained in to interrogate their own logic. His works thus ask the key question: to what other ends can the apparatus of formerly propagandistic painting be put?

In the two decades of his mature output, Wang Xingwei has created an artistic universe all of his own, where references collide, characters recur, and styles proliferate, articulated in a deliciously skilful range of styles. While still working in Shenyang and Haicheng in Liaoning province, Wang was arguably “discovered” by the late Dutch curator Hans van Dijk in the mid-1990s and quickly fell into the Beijing circle around van Dijk, Ai Weiwei, and their experimental gallery China Art Archives and Warehouse. Wang’s early works contain some of the most astute dialogues with Western art history and critiques of the fraught situation of Chinese artists ever produced in China, though he quickly tired of this type of referentiality, which has since become a major trend among the younger generation. In the early and mid-2000s, during an extended sojourn in Shanghai, he developed a distinct world of characters and styles, and a painting based on conscious variation and repetition among these. Nurses, golfers, airline stewardesses, penguins, pandas, old ladies, and cartoon lovers appear and disappear, flickering through Wang’s painterly consciousness, hiding for years at a time, and reappearing undeterred. Like John Currin or George Condo, Wang Xingwei is deeply proficient in numerous painting styles, borrowing entire regimens of technique as if appropriating readymades. Wang Xingwei has been actively reluctant to narrate his own work. Having produced only two catalogues to date, both of which consciously exclude critical commentary, he proposes to let his paintings speak for themselves.

Wang Xingwei’s work has been collected by major private and institutional players including UliSigg, Guy and MyriamUllens, Sammlung Goetz, Lionel Ringier, Cristiane Leister, QiaoZhibing, the Minsheng Art Museum, and the Rubell Family Collection. Selected group and solo shows include: Biennale d’art Contemporain de Lyon (1997); the 1st Guangzhou Triennial, Guangdong Museum of Art, Guangzhou (2002); Shanghai Biennale (2006); Large Rowboat, GalerieUrsMeile, Beijing (2007); Thirty Years of Chinese Contemporary Art 1979-2009, Minsheng Art Museum, Shanghai (2010); and The State of Things, Brussels/Beijing, at the National Art Museum of China, Beijing (2010), curated by Fan Di’an, Ai Weiwei, Luc Tuymans and Philippe Pirotte.

CATALOGUE
A full-length, bilingual (Chinese-English) exhibition catalogue will accompany the exhibition, featuring essays by Philip Tinari, Museum Migros fur Gegenwartkunst curator Rafael Gygax, leading Chinese independent curator Zhang Li, and critic NatalineColonello. Containing extended commentary and reproductions of nearly 100 of Wang’s works, it will be by far the most comprehensive publication on the artist to date. Wang Xingweiis published by UCCA in collaboration with the Beijing editorial studio Hinabook and the World Book Publishing House. It is designed by the design studio Hinterland, New York, and available from the UCCA bookstore (UCCASTORE @ ART.BOOK).

UCCA LIMITED EDITIONS
UCCA Limited Editions and Wang Xingwei have collaborated to make a Limited Edition series of prints of the Old Lady series that will be available from UCCASTORE to coincide with the exhibition. In this new image, a copperplate print published in an edition of ten, the old lady holds a pair of cats in her arms. The limited edition will debut at Art Basel in Hong Kong the week following the exhibition opening.

EXHIBITION SUPPORT
Major support for this exhibition comes from QiaoZhibing and GalerieUrsMeile, with additional support from the Fondation Guy &MyriamUllens. Further support comes from the UCCA Patrons Council. DuvelMoortgat has generously provided support in kind for the exhibition opening. The exhibition is possible only with the generosity of numerous lenders to the exhibition, including Bo Jiguang, Johnson Tsong-ZungChang, Erlenmeyer Foundation, Guan Yi Contemporary Art Archive, GuZhenqing, He Jing Yuan Art Museum, He Juxing, Huang Liaoyuan, M+ Sigg Collection, UrsMeile, Meng Xianghua, Modern Chinese Art Foundation, Peng Pei-Cheng, Qin Qi, Ellen & Michael Ringier, Andrew Ruff, Manuel Salvisberg, UliSigg, Taikang Life Insurance Co., Ltd., Tang Contemporary Art Center, Tian Jun, Tian Kai, Yao Chien, Zhang Rui, and ZongFeng.

Image: Wang Xingwei, "Untitled (Watering Flowers)," 2013. Oil on canvas, 240 x 200 cm. Courtesy of the artist and Galerie Urs Meile.

PRESS
Phone: +86 10 5780 0200
Email: press@ucca.org.cn

UCCA
798 Art District, No. 4 Jiuxianqiao Lu, Chaoyang District, Beijing, China 100015
Tuesday to Sunday 10:00am – 7:00pm
Last entry at 6:30pm
General admission: ¥10 per person
FREE for:
students (with valid ID)
UCCA members (with card)
children under 130 centimeters
disabled visitors
seniors over 60 (with valid ID)
FREE admission on Thursdays

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