Yun Wang

In our present age, with its exuberant visual culture and new image-generating media, figurative and abstract tendencies in art are being explored for their specific potential and their authenticity and tradition questioned. With its diverse recourse to different times and cultures, the manifold strategies of contextualization and the construction of multi-layered reference systems, we encounter the contemporary as an open and atemporal form of expression. The Chinese-born artist Yun Wang originally came to Vienna to study opera singing at the conservatory. In the city of the arts, however, she turned to painting and completed her studies with Daniel Richter in the “Extended Painterly Space” class. Her painting borrows from traditional Chinese art as well as the Western post-war avant-garde, where Far Eastern ideas meet Western philosophy. The Chinese ink drawing with its flowing transitions and abstract, abbreviated settings and the cloudy spaces of landscape painting are abstracted, as it were, and transformed into floating and pulsating pictorial spaces. Yun Wang has developed a technique of glazing with oil paint, thus transferring the fluidity of Chinese ink drawings into painting. In her painting process, which oscillates between intuition and experience, chance and calculation, she lays layer upon layer of paint, evoking a vibrant dynamic through her sensitive gestures and creating what Robert Fleck has called a “floating” of the pictorial space. She sometimes removes these condensed paintings from the stretcher frame, folds and crumples them and uses epoxy resin to create permanent sculptural objects from this temporary state of concentrated energy, arranging them into installative formations. The inspiration for the folded canvases comes from her preoccupation with scientific theories about multidimensional universes. However, it is not only her interest in science that informs her art or her love of music or her awareness of her origins, but her works are also testimonies to the times. Today we speak of a “fluid society” or “liquid modernity” (Zygmunt Bauman) to describe the dissolution of the foundations of our coexistence. Yun Wang transforms the “liquid present”, which cannot retain any form and cannot bind either space or time, into a solid form with a clear spatial orientation.

Roman Grabner, 2024