王凯凡 KAIFAN WANG

睡前故事 Bedtime Stories

GNYP 画廊 安特卫普

2025年9月6日至2025年10月25日

作者：萨姆·斯特维尔林克（Sam Steverlynck）

翻译：王凯凡工作室

GNYP 画廊荣幸呈现王凯凡（Kaifan Wang）个展 “Bedtime Stories” – “睡前故事”。这是艺术家与画廊的第四场个展，也是他在 GNYP 比利时安特卫普空间的第二次展出。GNYP 画廊最初创立于德国柏林，此次展览延续了王凯凡在欧洲持续展开的艺术实践。

王凯凡，1996年出生于中国内蒙古呼和浩特，成长于戈壁边缘，自幼便接触多种文化。他接受过书法训练，对中国传统绘画也有深厚理解。他的艺术实践跨越多个地域，从北京、上海，到佛罗伦萨、柏林——后者已成为他生活近十年的城市。这种游走的生活经验，也渗透进他的绘画语言中。与许多探索抽象的东方与西方艺术家一样，王的作品具备丰富的文化混融性与动作性。然而，与某些极端现代主义者排斥叙事与外部指涉的倾向不同，王凯凡的作品往往将记忆、现实与历史以更加柔和而隐秘的方式层层织入画面。他的图像往往回应展出地的文化语境，例如蓝色系列以海洋殖民与贸易背景下的代尔夫特陶瓷与文化传播，金色系列回应美国加州淘金热中华人的移民史，黄色则唤起他童年生活的戈壁地貌。

在本次 GNYP 安特卫普展览中，黄色依然是作品的主色，象征着“家”的意象——既是地理的，也是情感与精神层面的。“睡前故事”这一标题指向童年时期与祖父母共度的午后宁静时光。他的家族曾在19世纪至20世纪初参与协助比利时传教士在内蒙地区的天主教传播。宗教图像在其成长过程中具有启蒙意义，祖辈协助建造的教堂中，那些悬挂在墙上的西方圣像复制品，使他自幼便接触到天主教丰富的视觉语言、象征体系与典型母题。这不仅构成了他最早的视觉艺术经验，也预示了他日后创作中对图像象征与身体仪式的持续探索。此次展出的《Melted Halo II》《Grace comes Down》（均创作于2025年）即借用了这些早期记忆——金黄的颜料如云团般流淌，唤起了动态而富于情感的视觉感受，这源自神父在他幼年额头上用拇指划十字的祝福动作，二十五年后，这一仪式被他重新转化为绘画动作，在画布上再次被重演。它不仅承载着记忆的回响，也成为他多样化绘画语言中的一环，与他惯用的技法相结合——如用海绵涂抹颜料层，或以固体油画棒进行痕迹式的书写。

展览亦包含对“低地国家”古典绘画的回应，例如收藏于布鲁塞尔皇家美术馆（Royal Museums of Fine Arts）的梅尔基奥·德·洪代科特（Melchior d’Hondecoeter）《Dead Rooster》（17世纪）与老彼得·勃鲁盖尔（Pieter Breugel the Elder）《The Fall of the Rebel Angels》（公元1562年）。与他作品中的其他绘画引用一样，观众无需辨识具体出处，亦能感受到他在风格语言上的表现力。王凯凡以自信而敏锐的方式，将原作的构图结构还原至其视觉核心，转化为线与色的动态编排，并在多个版本中不断重复演练，试图捕捉那难以言说的本质。其中尤以《Dead Rooster》为例，当他初次在布鲁塞尔看到这幅画时，它唤起他对耶稣受难的联想——一个在西方文化中早已被视觉消费、甚至钝化的意象，却常常被忽视其视觉冲击与暴力感。在王凯凡致敬之作《Studying Dead Rooster: Posture》中，他将公鸡倒挂，以此扭转画面的能量流动，从而放大原作中“肉体脆弱”与“精神抽离”之间的张力。

这种“倒置视角”也延续到了本次展览中为画廊空间特别创作的巨幅作品《Clouds fell on Scorched Field》。这件高260宽520厘米的大型画作悬挂于天花板上，观众需仰视或通过地板镜面观看。与《Morning Mist》《Buried Beneath the Meadow》等作品类似，这幅作品同样取材于他故土风景，但又以近乎史诗般的规模呈现——云雾翻滚，仿佛天使之战或能量的激荡波动。而这种强烈的情感唤起，正是他多年探索所凝聚出的独特力量。由于作品尺寸巨大，他不得不改变平时的动作方式，将海绵绑在长杆末端，从远处挥动，让海绵摩擦画布。这种创作方法部分参考了马蒂斯晚年“远距离绘画”的实验，却被他发展为一种高度个人化的语言。在这一过程中，他有意识地摒弃单一视角，不仅是技法上的突破，更回应了作品中跨文化语境的混合性与复杂性。

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萨姆·斯特维尔林克（Sam Steverlynck，1979年生）是比利时艺术评论家与策展人，常为多家比利时及国际知名刊物撰稿，包括《De Standaard》《Art Review》《artpress》《Metropolis M》《DAMn°》与《hART》，并不时受邀在比利时电台KLARA发表评论。2018至2021年间，他担任《hART》杂志的主编。自2021年起，他开始担任比利时高级艺术学院（HISK）研究生项目的策展人。

目前，斯特维尔林克是根特市立当代艺术博物馆（S.M.A.K.）藏品与研究部门的副策展人。此前他曾与馆长菲利普·范·考特伦（Philippe Van Cauteren）共同策划展览“Pieter Engels: Fabulous Oldest Hits”。2025年初，他又与The Phoebus Foundation合作，在科特赖克新成立的Abby美术馆策划了开幕展“Fklore：重塑传统”。该展旨在以更具包容性和思辨性的方式呈现艺术，体现了他对当代表达与历史传统对话的持续关注。

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（英文原文）

GNYP Gallery is honoured to present the exhibition Bedtime Stories by Kaifan Wang. It is the fourth solo exhibition by the artist, the second one in the Antwerp branch of the gallery that was founded in Berlin.

Kaifan Wang (°1996, Hohhot, Inner Mongolia) grew up the region of the Gobi Desert, from an early age exposed to different cultures. Trained in calligraphy and familiar with traditional Chinese landscape painting, he kept on expanding his artistic and geographic horizon, moving from Beijing and Shanghai to Florence and Berlin, a city he has called home for the past ten years. This nomadic lifestyle also translated to the different influences he integrated in his pictorial practice, in line with a rich history of cross-cultural exchange between artists from the East and the West embracing the abstract idiom, often with a strong gestural dimension. But unlike some of the die-hard modernists he admires, banning every sense of narrative or outer painterly reference, Wang’s memories of his place of birth – probably triggered by the geographical distance – daily observations and socio-political events trickle down in a sublimated manner in his multi-layered compositions. He also often adds references to the region where he is exhibiting his work by means of a central theme, motive, or dominant colour scheme. Earlier, he made a series in blue, referring to Delft blue pottery, the result of Chinese-Dutch trade relations; gold, as a reference to the goldrush in California which attracted a high amount of Chinese fortune seekers for an exhibition in Los Angeles; or yellow, evoking the Gobi Desert from his childhood.

For his exhibition at GNYP in Antwerp, Wang continues mainly in the yellow colour scheme, as he evokes a sense of home, both as a physical and mental place. Bedtime Stories refers to childhood memories, to peaceful naps in the afternoon with his grandparents’ family who were continuing the pioneering work of Belgian missionaries in the expansion of Catholicism in Hohhot in the 19th, early 20th century. Instrumental was the use of religious iconography, which Wang discovered at an early age by means of copies of Western paintings hanging in the church his forefathers helped to build. Besides Catholicism’s visual language, with all its symbols and tropes, there were also rituals and gestures that were passed on. For the paintings Melted Halo II and Grace comes Down (all works 2025), evoking dynamic cloud-like compositions with hues of yellow and gold dripping down, Wang re-enacted the ritual of the priest blessing him as a little boy by forming a cross with his thumb on his forehead, a gesture the artist, almost twenty-five years later, repeats on canvas, to reinforce his already varied arsenal of techniques, including, amongst others, smearing layers of paint with a sponge and using oil stick as a form of mark-making.

There are also several, stripped-down references to artists from the Low Countries, amongst others Melchior d’Hondecoeter’s Dead Rooster (17th century) and Pieter Breugel the Elder’s The Fall of the Rebel Angels (1562) – both works on view at the Royal Museum of Fine Arts in Brussels. As with his other painterly references, one does not have to detect the allusions to enjoy Wang’s stylistic brilliance. In self-confident gestures, he strips down the inner structure of both paintings to their essentials, reducing the original composition to a dynamic game of lines and colour, an exercise he repeats throughout several versions of the same painting in an ongoing attempt to capture its essence. That is especially the case with d’Hondecoeter’s Dead Rooster, a work he keeps on getting back to. When he saw the painting for the first time in Brussels, it reminded him of Jesus hanging on the cross, an image we in the West are so attuned – or even immune – to, that we no longer realize its visual strength and violence. In his first version, appropriately called Studying Dead Rooster: Posture, Wang has depicted the rooster upside down to alter the energy flow, as he was intrigued by the contrast of the bodily fragility and spiritual detachment of the original painting.

That change of perspective, the upside-down rendering, is also echoed in Clouds fell on Scorched Field, an impressive painting Wang specially made for the architecture of the gallery. To admire the work, one must look up at the ceiling – or down in a mirror reflecting the ceiling painting. Like Morning Mist, Buried Beneath the Meadow and other work mentioned earlier, it is a landscape from his childhood, rendered in almost epical proportions, as a Battle between Angels, a huge clash, turbulent movement or wave of energy he manages to evoke so well by means of a technique he had developed over the years. Because of the work’s immense size (260 by 520 cm), Wang had to change his usual gestural apparatus, attaching sponges to the end of long poles, swinging them from a distance to rub against the canvas—an approach partly inspired by but adapted from Matisse’s late painting method. The result of this technique is that there is no longer one single, dominant perspective, which was not only important from a technical point of view but also a conceptual one, in line with the cross-cultural pollination his work bears witness to in the most outstanding way.

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Sam Steverlynck (b. 1979) is a Belgian art critic and curator. He contributes regularly to renowned Belgian and international publications—such as De Standaard, Art Review, artpress, Metropolis M, DAMn° and hART — and occasionally appears on Belgian radio station KLARA. From 2018 to 2021, Steverlynck served as editor‑in‑chief of hART magazine. In 2021, he took on the role of curator for the HISK postgraduate program. 

Steverlynck is currently associate curator in the collections and research department at S.M.A.K. (Stedelijk Museum voor Actuele Kunst) in Ghent, where he previously co-curated “Pieter Engels: Fabulous Oldest Hits” with Philippe Van Cauteren. Earlier this year,  he co-curated “Fklore. Reinventing Tradition”, the inaugural exhibition at the newly opened Abby museum in Kortrijk, a collaboration with The Phoebus Foundation that reflects a shared ambition to present art in a more inclusive and thought-provoking way.

摄像师：Ludger Paffrath

新古典表演者：Niya Juste 和 Nina Vanhout

视频制作：Fien De Vos