KAIFAN WANG

Bull Washer/Stierwascher

COMMUNE Gallery

February 29 – April 05, 2024

Daniel Lippitsch & Abby McKenzie / Curators

Kaifan Wang’s chosen title for his first exhibition in Austria – Bull Washer – derives from the legend which supposedly took place during an ancient siege of Salzburg in which the people pretended not to suffer from starvation by painting a bull in different colours to prove an abundance of supplies. However, the main relation is the aspect of the later washing of the bull in the river as a gentle gesture of protection, gratitude and recreation. Through this, Wang’s paintings and videos focus on the thematical approach of erasure and the application of these elements within two differentiating cultural boundaries.

The most direct relation to the titular tale is the video Look Back (2023), which endlessly loops a Mongolian bull in the outskirts of Hohhot, the capital of Inner Mongolia and Wang’s hometown, seen from the main highway. The plain directness of the motionless bull as an agrarian symbol for the politically charged landscape of Inner Mongolia, being defined by Han Chinese as well as Mongolian cultures, delivers a monument of stability and local identify. This stands in contrast to the video Bull Washer (2024), where the act of erasure is explored through performative painterly gestures of a brush wiping the snow from the walls at Teufelsberg in Berlin. The site of Teufelsberg is a non-natural hill created in the twenty years following the end of the Second World War, consisting of rubble moved from the destroyed buildings of West Berlin. The site itself is unique in Germany as the rubble covers the incomplete construction of a Nazi military college designed by Albert Speer which the allies were unable to destroy with explosives and thus chose to cover with the debris. The video sequences the alternation between aggressive sweeping of snow from the main walls to unveil its underlying structures, contrasted by the intimate stillness in the woods and the gentle movements of taking off layers of snow from frozen blossoms and twigs nearby.

These elements of historical and cultural effacing and the dichotomy between the aggressive components with a gentler erosive act of erasure are key to the thematic and technical aspects of Wang’s painting practice. The gestural movements from which the layers of paint are composed upon the canvas are then left to dry and scratched from the surface, creating a process of removal that retains an echo of the previous action and colour. The compositions seem to wander and aim for an exterior position outside the limitation of the image and the dripping effects add to the fluidity of the historical references and aspects of time that mutates and abstracts.

The contradictions within the emotive gestures lead into a dialogue between the traditions of abstraction within Western and Chinese painterly techniques. In this regard, Wang is interested in the violent and dominant movements that have a prevalence within the western canon of abstract painting with bold colour fields applied as if with force. However, simultaneously the works possess an aqueous quality that feels bequeathed from the traditions of Chinese ink painting, with a flowing constitution moving through the dilution of colour across the strokes of paint. The integration of these aspects and the interrogation of the duality of their cultural signifiers and displacements, ultimately encapsulates the essence of Wang’s practice, through the tender exploration of both his own cultural identity and a wider interest in the manner through which we construct and erase ancestral histories.

— Daniel Lippitsch & Abby McKenzie, COMMUNE, February 2024, Vienna

[…] Memory and experience aren’t limited to the personal in Wang‘s painting. “Stories are a way that I understand my art,” he says. “It’s not only the pictures that are important, but what is in the distance, behind them.” For his recent show at Vienna’s Commune Gallery, Bull Washer – including video works; Wang makes sculpture too – the artist searched for local stories. But he didn’t look to the usual places, like Freud’s old address. Rather, he gazed outward, to the folk tales of the countryside.

One such story he found originates with Europe’s 16th-century Bauernkrieg, or Farmer’s War. Back then, Salzburg was under threat, besieged by an enemy looking to starve its inhabitants. Food are scarce, and there was only one bull left in the city’s fortress. Something needed to be done. So, clever as they were, the Salzburgers came up with a strategy: each day, they painted the animal anew and showed it off, giving their enemy the impression of plenty. Eventually, the foreign army lost patience and went away, and the people of Salzburg celebrated by giving the bull a good wash in the Salzach river.

So goes one of the tales behind the cycle. The defensive action of painting the bovine is followed by the soft act of washing; a hard line is drawn, only for it to be later, lovingly, washed away. “What, for me, is interesting is how can I control a soft material, like a sponge, to make hard lines,” Wang says of the movements in the Bull Washer series – opposed in the story, reconciled in the painting. Like his earlier works, the calligraphy-like marks still cohere around forms that fall out as others fall in, that come together and apart. But now there is more water in the pigment, and the edges have softened – in fact, the lines are dripping, just like the bull in the river, running not only the paint but with memories too.

But these canals of color are much more discreet that those of, say, Cy Twombly’s bloody Bacchus  (2006-08) series, a reference of Wang’s, as are the cows in the work of the great sinner Francis Bacon. And I see, amidst the sweeping lines that call back to the rigger of his early calligraphy classes, suggestions of Cecily Brown. “I’am connecting all of these references together to create my own stories,” Wang says, smiling as he tells me of further designs or coincidences: the cow’s sacred place in Hare Krishna, the fact that Hohhot is China’s milk capital. […]

— Benjamin Barlow, Crossing Time – Kaifan Wang, BLAU INTERNATIONAL No.10, p56-63, April 2024, Berlin