Galerie du Monde is honored to present ‘Forms of Line’, a solo exhibition of Chinese ink paintings by Wang Chuan, as a prologue to 2017. The exhibition will run from 6 January to 4 February 2017. More than a dozen paintings from across two decades will be displayed during the exhibition in order to show the evolution of the artist’s work. Selected pieces from the late 1990s and early 2000s will be featured, alongside some of Wang’s latest work.
Wang Chuan (b. 1953, Chengdu, China) is an American Chinese artist who started realistic painting during the Cultural Revolution in China in the 1960s. He received a Bachelor’s Degree in Chinese Painting at the Sichuan Fine Arts Institute in Chongqing and developed ink painting in Shenzhen in the 1980s. He then moved to the United States in 1997. After a year, his serious health problems prompted him to practice Buddhism and to make a pilgrimage to Pokhara, Nepal. Through his difficult life experiences, Wang conveys his feelings in his work with great passion.
The ‘Forms of Line’ exhibition will showcase Wang’s Chinese ink paintings in different periods of time. During the late 1990s, his paintings Jungle, Apparition 1 and Apparition 2 were formed by heavy and expressive brushstrokes with a balancing blank space. The dedicated composition of the paintings and experienced technique by Wang established him to be one of the most influential and successful artists in Chinese contemporary abstract ink painting.
“The perfect state in a painting cannot be reached through any brush techniques. The real technique for obtaining perfection has no form, therefore, it cannot be seen on paper.” mentioned by Wang Chuan.
Between 1998 and the early 2000s, dots and lines became the vital elements in Wang Chuan’s paintings. 1998 was a difficult year for Wang due to his health and he sought to express his emotions by applying red color onto his paintings. According to Wang, he needed to inject a bright red drug which is highly toxic during his medical treatments. Thus, the red colors on his works Burial of Hanging Coffin and Tree symbolize the unforgettable period of his illness.
For the paintings done recently, Wang Chuan eliminated details in the paintings and worked with expressive curved brushstrokes and linear geometric patterns to convey his ideas. The genre of simplicity and the use of subject matter in his works seen in Heaven and Earth, Cubes No. 1 and House have become the fundamental direction of his latest art development.
Wang Chuan, one of the most pre-eminent Chinese contemporary artists, uses abstract ink painting as a medium to release and express the most essential part of himself to the audience and will be presented in the coming exhibition ‘Forms of Line’ at Galerie du Monde, Hong Kong.