Sun: You previously said painting is your playground. We all know that “seeing” and “doing” are two different things. “playground” is associated with relaxation and pleasure, which are notions that painters rarely discuss.

Wang: We didn’t have LEGO when I grew up, but we had other intellectually stimulating toys. I didn’t want to go to my parents for help solving them. I always wanted to do it myself. Easy is not fun since the impossible is addictive and cool. The “playground” of painting is the same - limitless supplies, limitless visual materials, blank canvases, paint waiting for you to caress, brushes dedicated to giving you their all-myriad of possibilities, I guess. If you’re stuck and haven’t thought it through, you just start again or paint something else. Things that you can devote your full concentration to are one’s source of pleasure.

Of course, I, too, have come to realize that painting is in itself a challenge, a luxurious pursuit that is seemingly absurd. As I examine my works retrospectively, I relive the struggles, though with patience, all seem to brighten up with the occasional surprise. There isn’t an easy path. Happiness is embedded in bitterness, and vice versa. Even paradises have bleak winters.

Sun: How you forgone formal training in painting reminds me of the European painting scene in the 19th century, which produced masters such as Van Gogh, Gaugin and Cézanne, who too weren’t pupils of art schools. They liberated painting，and their impact influenced generations that followed. It could be said that their endured love affair with painting, the way they immersed themselves, were endeavors marked with incredible risk-taking, whereas contemporary artists only thirst for immediate success or some sort of compensation for their insecurity – oblivious to the fact that the process to create art is a struggle, akin to that of love.

Wang: That was a moment of suspense when you mentioned these three names. They are my favorite artists, and it is as if they are immortals. It is lethal when one gives it their all as they explore the unknown with their most sincere selves. I don’t think they were trying to shock the world, but they were merely exploring unforgivingly through new perspectives to discover their own artistic language. There are no limits to these kinds of explorations. I do believe they will remain true to themselves even if they go through art school and will still be great artists nonetheless. It is in their nature to be rebellious. Perhaps forgoing art school enabled them to be more agile as they weren’t tamed by rigid academic conventions, ultimately allowing them to retain their wild spirits and naivety.  

“Success” is a frightening word. What succeeds it? More success, more fame, less access? Everyone reads paintings differently. The pursuit of immediate success and the pursuit of the true meaning of art are divergent paths. We all make our own choices, as does the market that requires different artists and works of art.

I hope my success is delivered further in time, though the lack of it wouldn’t matter either. The only thing that matters is my enduring passion, for painting if not a naive person. This comes to mind a question a friend once posed: who are you most afraid of to attend your exhibitions?

Sun: Who indeed?

Wang: Plenty for sure, but maybe none at the same time. If I were to revisit my last show, I might feel the urge to make changes with the “I can paint this better” always lingering. Though this sentiment isn’t all that important compared to being honest. Opportunists and those who rely on parlor tricks will always fear the day they are exposed. So I have to ask myself every time, why I should be afraid for anyone to see my work.

Sun：Where do you begin when you look at a blank canvas? What stimulates your urge to express?

Wang: I have canvases of different dimensions in my studio. I don’t come up with fully thought-through ideas before putting in a canvas order. My ideas for new works tend to be quite abstract to begin with, sometimes pondering extensively. Drafting gives me the greatest joy, and new ideas subsequently surge. The beauty of our world, its absurdity, its woes… these are my sources of inspiration.

Sun: Have you changed overtime? Compared to the very beginning of your practice?

Wang: I think I have been relatively constant - still facing blank canvases. I carry knowledge from previous works onto the next, but sometimes, I try to forget them and start with a new slate. Compared to the very beginning of my practice, I have become more patient and daring.

Sun: We can observe at least two strands from your current artistic practice; one delves into exploring bodily matters that stylistically lean towards expressionism while the other focuses on constructing visual narratives. The former is a derivative of your firsthand experiences as a dancer, whereas the latter highlights your involvement working backstage in theatre. Pictorially, they seem opposites but a common thread still runs through them simultaneously.

Wang: Dance and theatre are both stage arts that possess a uniquely captivating charm with their immediacy. Pitch black, the view of the spectators from the stage is reminiscent of a blank canvas, a stark contrast to the fully lit stage; and a different craft to film without close-up shots. Dancers don’t engage in dialogue but they internalize their own scripts. Actors too, need to utilize their bodies in their performance. As you wrote in your essay, the face and body are inseparable. Dance tends to be scarce in facial expressions. The body becomes the face in this sense, with emotions at the inner core expressed through one’s limbs. Great performances are recognized by those who can leave the most subtle impressions even with audiences on the balcony, be it the slightest twitch in the eyebrows, or the thump of one’s heartbeat.

Regarding those somehow expressionist works, I thrive on painting the sense of flowing movement, action, and chaos even in the most expressionist works. The dancers I depict aren’t necessarily ‘civilized’ nor dance in the most elegant manner. Under the blazing light, they may just appear momentarily in a flash and disappear again. The more I paint, the more I feel as though these are works of abstraction since my starting point wasn’t to depict “dance” itself but rather more so works influenced by dance.

My narrative works are grounds to depict meaningful scenes that seek to be intellectually stimulating. Right Now, Wrong Then was inspired by a Hong Sang-Soo’s film where men and women drink and eat from daybreak as they wrestle with their inner struggles. The invisible wine glass is akin to the hypothetical in dramas; it exists for as long as you believe in its presence, then the wine glass exists, and so does the wine.

Sun: I see a modest number of images of Pina Bausch’s performances in your studio, which I believe to be references for your practice.

Wang: Pina Bausch is my favorite dancer and choreographer. Her works encapsulate the entire spectrum of human emotions - filled with absurdity, recklessness, fragility, melancholy, and humor at the same time. There is no shortage of “ugliness” in the choreographed moves in her works. In fact, her dance company is known to employ many amateur dancers, yet they remain to radiate.

Bausch trains her dancers uncoventionally. Training sessions are about excavating the performer’s inner self. Many steps aren’t choreographed by her, more accurately, she extracts them from within her performers. She reaches your inner depths, compelling you to discover your own unknowns in presenting organic and refreshingly new ways to express.

The dance of the girl in the yellow dress in The Lily of the Valley is inspired by the petite steps in the chorus line from Bausch’s Dancing Dreams. It is somewhat bizarre, as if it is resisting certain things. I had her painted in the open air, and I also painted animals trying to mimic her moves, as if they all had a bestial existence.

Sun: You touched on Pina Bausch’s training methods. Given that your painting practice stems from your inner self, do you also have your own way of training?

Wang: Paintings need to be nourished. It is a long journey ahead. One reads, thinks, and externalizes emotions and feelings. We watch performances and converse with others.

It’s not great to overwork or overly relax when one paints. I sometimes force myself to take half-hour breaks to create some distance and space to think. I don’t allow myself to paint even if these thoughts come within five minutes. It is not always a smooth process and the more composure I gain, the easier it is to overcome these blockages. Paintings should not constrict life; they should instead broaden it as if in a symbiotic process of mutual nourishment.

Sun: Apart from the apparent themes in your paintings, how would you describe the internalized relationship between your paintings and dance.

Wang: I am still dancing to this date, though not for the purpose of being on stage. I need this physical training and to sweat outside the realms of painting. I choreograph a lot of the actions and poses. I first feel and enact them myself before painting them, which makes them quite different. Pain is the product of dance, and it has its limits, its own thresholds. I need this pain, which is foreign to that of muscle memory from painting.

Sun: Perhaps muscle memory from dance and your paintings converges at specific points in time.

Wang: Perhaps indeed. The stretched and relaxed body can bring the same kind of composed state of mind. Pain in the body is toughening, and works to combat the difficulties of painting.

Sun: Returning to your narrative paintings such as those in your “Where Your Gaze Touches” series, your visual language is exercised with restraint, and heightened awareness of spatial constructions. From my perspective, they have a markedly more intimate relationship with the external world.

Wang: I see viewers looking at paintings at museums and galleries. I do wonder what they see, what they think and subconsciously feel the urge to photograph the viewer and the works. Where Your Gaze Touches explores this viewing relationship with the paintings in my paintings which are also my works. Within these paintings where the viewer is looking at a painting, the viewer then becomes the spectacle, the one who is now being viewed. There is a figure in the painting who even returns the gaze towards the viewers. The works that I complete will keep viewers looking at them, further compounding the gaze within. However, I wouldn’t necessarily know what the viewer is looking at in this intricately complex web of gazes in varying directions.

The figure wearing a sweater in Where Your Gaze Touches (IV) is a viewer I saw at a museum in Japan who resonated with me, so I photographed him. His watch was large and loose - perhaps he used to have a bit of weight? I have this “actor” in hand that would most likely paint. I found a work that would match him and decided to invite him onto my canvas. Though his gaze is elsewhere, he is unable to view the painting where he is being painted.

Sun: I realize that there are no watch hands on his watch.

Wang: That is true. I froze time since he was studying the painting so intensely. This reminds me of the beginning of Ingmar Bergman’s film Wild Strawberries where there is a clock without clock hands.

Sun: This is why I introduced the concept of “theatricality” when discussing your paintings in my essay. From the way I see it, you process externalized and internalized experiences through the “body”, which is how your paintings become the embodiment of the stage. Very consciously done, you converge experiences across different mediums, sharpening your capacity to express things with greater accuracy. 

Wang: Peter Brook’s The Empty Space was a prescribed text when I was at university. Anything can happen in an empty space. We can put on a Shakespeare performance,  stage Waiting for Godot, or act out infinite dreams. The Chinese translator for this book is also a theatre director. We have rehearsed a play together and enacted a war scene in an empty space. In this way, the canvas really is my stage where anything can be acted out. There are some plays that I would like to reinterpret through painting.

Sun: The female figures painted in the final panel of the four-panel polyptych The Castle are your self-portraits. In fact, “your image” is a recurrent presence in some of your other works, though the “she/her” does not seem to be associated with feminism but is more so a symbol of the figurative and the abstracted “self”.

Wang: I imagined The Castle Act IV as the end of the performance, the end of a dream. The audience has cleared the theatre and no one will be seen backstage either. The King-like impression of the elderly figure still lingers. I am left alone to sketch and reminisce, a bit like my mundane, ordinary days, creating alone at the studio. I treated each of the four panels equally, painting a similar number of characters in each, so I felt compelled to paint eight of me. Eight self-portraits “performing” me painting. I do hope there isn’t a distinction between protagonists or supporting characters in The Castle.

Sun: This might not necessarily be the case. From the perspective of a play, characters with more actions or movement tend to attract the viewer’s gaze more easily. That said, the elderly figure at the center is figurative and seemingly transformed into a symbol, whereas great theatrical tension is found among those surrounding him.

Wang: I painted him as someone who seemingly knows it all, which is possibly why it is somewhat abstract. I painted him first in both the second and the fourth scenes, doing so, I will have someone looking over my shoulders as a staunch supporter of this act.

Sun: Whether it is the drama King Lear or Kafka’s novel with the same name, The Castle, it is all a sort of abstraction. I think great art always has a degree of abstraction to it. This abstraction stems from narration whereby one can project life experiences across different spaces and times; at times, destiny reveals itself, and at others, we observe cyclical historical patterns.

Wang: Indeed, every character crafted under Shakespeare’s pen appears to be quite abstract. Romeo & Juliet is abstract, as is King Lear. There are plenty of King Lears and quite a few Macbeths in our world today. I don’t paint stories nor scenes. They might appear to be masked under the guise of “theatre”, breaking away from our lives, depicting… well, what you discussed previously.

Sun: I have come across peculiar readings of Kafka’s The Castle, with the “castle” interpreted as something god-like, as if it symbolizes an otherworldly supernatural authority.

Wang: Maybe the castle is just a façade for a kind of prison.

Sun: In essence, literary works are the distillation of life experiences that provide different worldviews from which we can derive a plethora of various interpretations.

Wang: I have come to the realization that I struggle to connect a worldview of any absolute certainty with that of my own daily life. I can paint my friends but would then be afraid to paint their lives, their upbringing, and stories, as if unconsciously casting them into a further distant realm without realizing at the end, winding up by painting a supposed image of them in my mind.

Sun: Unknowingly creating a sense of distance.

Wang: I have always wanted to paint Mrs. Cao in my studio but never dared to. She has children, a family, and a day job and still comes over to keep everything tidy during the weekends. I fear I won’t be able to depict her in the manner closest to her life. I am also afraid to have painted her hardships and failed to do so accurately. It makes me nervous to paint wrinkles, and perhaps I am shy from things and people close to me; proximity can be painful. 

Sun: Pain is a particular feeling, such as the muscle aches you talked about. But when you mentioned pain just now, I immediately thought of something André Breton once said, “the problem is no longer, as it used to be, a canvas can hold its own on a wheat field, but whether it can stand up against the daily paper, open or closed, which is a jungle”. In other words, this can be the kind of subjective rhetorical questioning our contemporary times demand of us. As a painter, have you ever thought about the question of the value and meaning of painting?

Wang: Stroke by stroke, giving it my best to complete. My feelings and my spirit of exploration go into it, as does my energy and my calling to be rebellious. “Holding one’s own” can be tiring, but don’t we all want to soar the skies? I believe good paintings can enrich one’s life, kindling intellectual thought. There have been a few times when I would stand in front of a painting for prolonged periods of time, leave for the exit, and head back to look at it again, to be continually awed by its magnificence, and then want to gobble it up. There have also been instances when I visit an exhibition just for that one work, but find it too precious to walk up to give it a good look, and end up seeing the rest before returning to it. Wow, you really can’t just look at reproductions. Then is perhaps why we find paintings in the flesh so charming and mesmerizing. I guess the meaning of the painting is that of the opposite of death, immortalizing all those within it.