Wang Yin

signed and titled in Chinese and dated 2005

Private Asian Collection 

China, Beijing, White Space Beijing, Clue, 20 September to 20 November 2005, p. 170

Wang Yin, Timezone 8, Beijing, China, 2006, p. 113

 Since the late-Qing dynasty, from the May 4^th Movement to the 1980s, the cultural frenzy was, for those preoccupied and perspicaciously attuned to the culture, caught up in a new ideology emerging from the anxiety of modernity and a re-positioning of tradition emerging from the anxiety of identity.  For Wang Yin, the combination of his intellectual background and the cultural milieu of the times plunged him deep into the clash and conflict between the traditional and the revolutionary. Inserting himself into the conversation through his personal experience has always been one of the main components of Wang Yin’s paintings, and New Residence can be considered one of the most striking demonstrations of this compulsion.

This work is often invoked in discussions of Wang Yin’s paintings. Its upside-down orientation chimes with the works of renowned German artist Georg Baselitz. During the same period, Wang Yin also created a still life of flowers with the same upside-down orientation, these two paintings being the artist’s sole “upside-down paintings” to date. Both the subject and the content of New Home reveal the artist’s attitude of mockery toward the advertisements of the real estate industry. But perhaps more meaningful is the attention it draws to the tension between the language of painting and the act of artistic creation. The upside-down orientation sidesteps the traditional conventions of narrative and interpretation, and suspends the usual judgments on technique, method, and aesthetic value. During a different period of the artist’s creative career, he experimented with other elements of painting, such as using only a single color in the portrayal of a subject; distorting and warping form, like exaggerating the size or length of a human body; or using incongruous materials, like rendering a sketch of a portrait to appear as a plaster mold. All of these methods are rooted in the same spirit. It is a shift in vision and perspective, a challenge and subversion of the object’s original visual appearance and other properties, intervening in the many layers of meaning and artistic interpretation in the process of the viewer’s engagement.

This upside-down orientation deepens the viewer’s sensation of risk in the appreciation and acceptance of the art, and from which arises more possibilities in the process of experiencing the painting. In Wang Yin’s design, we discover yet another layer, an emotional revelation, which is an element constant in all of Wang Yin’s works. The viewer’s viewing of the painting mirrors the act of Wang Yin’s creation – an upside-down process, from start to finish. In the “upside-down” treatment of brushwork, color, the rendering of light and dark, the artist’s personal style and charm are on full display. To fit the theme of the painting, Wang elected a style that he regarded as “common” and “vulgar”, yet it is clear that the language of the painting differs from that which he employed in other works depicting the common and base. Here, Wang Yin, with the upside-down orientation, successfully guides the viewer in the dissection and reconstruction of the elements of color, brushwork, and artistic image and concept. In this way, Wang Yin has conferred unique value upon the language of painting.