Aranya Art Center is pleased to present Chinese artist Wang Zhibo's first institutional solo exhibition, featuring eleven recent works on canvas that focus on four of her iconic motifs: human figures, snowmen, wood grain, and fabric patterns. This exhibition marks the first attempt to juxtapose these ostensibly disparate formal lexicons, revealing an internal logic that ties the artist's multiple lines of work together.
In Wang's pictures, bodies and figures do not refer to specific subjects, but stand in as "objects with shape," exuding a still-life-like presence. The artist is interested in rendering the ethos embedded within these forms, which resonates with her interest in portraying the snowman: a superficial, universal, yet amorphous artificial being that serves as a conduit for humans to project their emotions and creativity.
Gradually, the various geometrical patterns that used to envelope the shapes and their backgrounds begin to take center stage, acquiring a strong sense of agency and subjectivity. They are not pure abstract languages, but come from specific sources and fulfill precise purposes: the meticulously rendered patterns and folds of the fabric in the three paintings from the Unmanned series suggest temporal and spatial dimensions that have been calculated rationally, while the superimposed wood grain further disintegrates the objects and bodies they cover. As these diverse images and painterly techniques overlap, compress and blend, Wang's threads weave together and resonate into cacophonous and viscous pictures of contemporary life.
This exhibition is organized by Damien Zhang, director of Aranya Art Center, and exhibition coordinator Wu Yiyang.
Wang Zhibo
Born in 1981 in Zhejiang Province, Wang Zhibo lives and works between Hangzhou and Berlin. Her selected solo exhibitions include Standing Wave, Armory Show New York (2013); There is a Place with Four Suns in the Sky-Red, White, Blue and Yellow, Kiang Malingue Gallery (2016); He No Longer Looks Human, Kiang Malingue Gallery (2018); Actor, Gallery Weekend Beijing (2020). Her works have also been exhibited at Penrith Regional Gallery, Sydney (2014), Villa Vassilieff, Paris (2017), Guangdong Times Museum (2017), Berlin Times Art Center (2019), Schloss Oberdiessbach, Bern (2021), and Rolando Anselmi Gallery, Rome (2021).
