Xiaofu Wang
Expired Exhale
2018
11 x 8.5 inches (unframed scale)
Acrylic and colored pencil on found note
https://www.wang-xiaofu.org
Xiaofu Wang, born 1991, Wuhan, China, lives and works in Brooklyn, New York
In my painting I try to create a place where one layer allows another to escape its origin. This idea came to me while I was listening to a piano album, but I immediately realized its application to the visual arts. I am attracted to art that makes you doubt, to which your response, your feeling, is never certain. In which feeling need not follow the obligations of representation or of subject, but rather improvises: adapting and extending personal history (the range of experience, value) as compelled by one’s proximity to art. For as it is with the way of the world, you are never certain of life’s meaning, but you have the freedom to form opinions from self-knowledge.
So I invite uncertainties, lacunae, discordances—contradictions, even—into my paintings. They form an open system. Their exuberant abstractions restore an invisible and immaterial perception of the world to appearance, unfolding the inevitable ambiguities of the contour of existence. These ambiguities sometimes adhere, and sometimes fracture. This exciting uncertainty is the heart of my painting, emerging dynamically in its layers, their structure of interplay and exclusion. These spatial relations are encountered as kinesthetic haunting, as a mixture of restraint, of excessive airy openness and almost claustrophobic compression—landscapes of suggestion.
These dilemmas were born when I started to measure the distance between the world and myself. Because there is a question: what world? And what distance? World is a technology of divergence, it is material and spirit, it is the diversity of apprehension. It is good and bad: a toxic joy. It overwhelms, dominates—unless we retreat outside, to view its beautiful traps.
Distance is inescapably contingent. And as a nomadic Chinese, shifting from country to country, observing the transition of behaviors, of opinions, feedback of all sorts, I feel myself suspended. Suspended between cultures and forced to suspend judgement. Forced to become the outsider—indeed in China too, as always with my unpretty darker skin, and ever more the more I Westernize—I must wait to conclude, watching instead, hanging in political suspense. But this waiting is Chinese too, for we have written the world’s longest history (which remains unended) in the emotional poetry of our beautiful language. This is a legacy from which I can never be truly free.
Then sometimes I make paintings and think it doesn’t matter where I come from, think what matters is where I’m going. This is freedom, the contingent freedom of being human. I am a female Chinese artist painting in America. So I am human. I am part of the human. And I do not know the destiny of the human. Still—what I paint is human being.”
– Xiaofu Wang