Wang’s work is characterised by his reckoning with shifting social and cultural identities. He was awarded the Ivan Juritz Prize in Image for his graduate show Wall woodpeckers, which he describes: “In my installation, I use mattresses which were discarded by Chinese students who had to return to their home country from Germany due to the pandemic. I tightly tied the mattresses, in which the student’s bodies are inscribed. They appear full of tension. Small ceramic objects, resembling nails, encircle the rolled up mattresses, creating a threatening and fearful atmosphere. Building walls – to make borders visible, to include and exclude people – has always been a national principle and political concept. Since 2020, I have been collecting traces of broken and cracked walls, from different cities, and arranging them in my paintings. Hung as a background to the mattresses, the paintings create a hopeful yet ominous mood.”
— Ivan Juritz Prize 2022 & Mahler and LeWitt Studios, June 2022, London
[…] One is an act of building walls, and the other is an act of tearing down walls. The demolition of the wall is the result of globalisation, which to a certain extent provides an economic equality of cooperation, but at the same time, there have also been numerous dilemmas under the peers. The existence of the ‘other’, as an artist, ‘the existence of the other’ is a difference that not only maintains the individuality, but also advertises the ‘I’ in a world of great unity.
In the context of globalisation, it seems out of place to put forward the concept of ‘wall’, but it is an existence that cannot be ignored. Under the premise of blurring boundaries, should we be wary of what is our own and what is foreign?
One of the reasons paintings have become important to me again since the Covid-19 pandemic is that I have started to focus on understanding myself. Paintings carry a lot of my memory about me, including muscle memory and daily chores. Under the quarantine, I have discovered that a lot of people don’t get along with themselves. As a generation that grew up with the Internet, we have been surrounded by all kinds of voices from short videos and social media, letting ‘I’ become a microcosm of the masses, so I want to re-explore myself through painting, to construct an intrinsic value. […]
There has been always a wall somewhere. As long as we question the future, there will be a wall in front of us, which exists in different ways. In my Wall Woodpecker series, I want to raise a question about how individuals can break through an established ‘fortress of thought’ in different ‘Wall’ states, while providing the audience with such a reasonable ‘middle ground’?