XIYAO WANG
TOUCHING THE INVISIBLE
SONG ART MUSEUM, BEIJING, CHINA
30 DECEMBER 2023 – 3 MARCH 2024
The Song Museum is thrilled and extremely honored to present the solo exhibition of emerging artist Xiyao Wang. The artist has chosen to exhibit her masterpieces at the Song Museum through an intimate dialogue with the architecture of the Museum, which has the unique quality of fostering an organic connection both to the natural outside environment and to the visitor's own intimate, imaginary space. All coupled in making this holistic link part of a visual and sensory experience of art based on introspection, openness, and interconnection.
To enable such dialogue and experience, Xiyao unfolds a selected choice of paintings produced between 2020 and 2023, combining acrylic painting, oil sticks, colored pencil, and charcoal. The medium- and large-format paintings are part of a series whose titles all refer to elements of life in transformation.
On this path, Xiyao's work constantly decomposes and reconstructs moments of lightning and condensation, opening and suspension, extension, and dilution. Like a sound and musical environment, these fragments are loosened and linked less by narrative composition than by sensitive intensity.
“The carefree, natural, and ethereal state without boundaries is actually what I like the most and have always been exploring, seeking, and creating. When I paint, I feel this way, and sometimes even when I am not painting, I can occasionally find this feeling elsewhere, but it is not exactly the same. For example, in the moments of practicing ballet and guqin (an ancient Chinese musical instrument). I feel that these diverse experiences may interconnect, interchange, complement, and even ignite inspiration for my art, even if they are unique unto themselves. They, along with many other elements, have become integral parts of my life, influencing and shaping my creative process.” – Xiyao Wang 
Xiyao's work aims to represent the development of an inner, unshakeable energy, an intangible void that is not nothing, but on the contrary at the place where all possibilities emerge. While human beings persist in constructing, designing, planning, and controlling space and time under the concept of "landscape", or "ecosystem" to use this contemporary swear word overused everywhere in our vocabulary, Xiyao points out and unties the codes of a representation to better link the elements of the living becoming in their capacity to embrace transformation, accident, germination, and efflorescence.
The line, so crucial in Xiyao's work no longer manifests itself as a delimitation, composition, or enclosure of the figure. It blends into the intangible emptiness of the canvas combined with dilutions or condensations of colors, producing infinite inter-relations between the material space of the painting and the intensity of a becoming that no longer suffices with the limited beliefs of space and time.