Prologue

“Art is a form of confession."

— Albert Camus

Every individual artist creates a world. This world is a castle for Wang You - but not the fairy tale kind, all perfect spires and gilded halls; it's a half-formed, disconnected structure. The ecstasy of creation and the hesitations of vulnerability remain embedded in its making as integral materials. This castle welcomes us as a sanctuary and a space littered with even chaos. Order attempts to encage chaos, and chaos oozes through the crevices of order.

Wang You's four paintings - entitled Castle but presented in sequential order as Acts I to IV - borrow a rhythm from classical drama: ritual, rupture, absence, return. Each painting lives in a liminal instant, picturing the construction of the castle but also asking and ever-deconstructing its borders. Every brushstroke is a brick; every figure is a cornerstone - not a unified image but an anatomy of construction and deconstruction.

Power traditionally lies with the king. Here, though, in Wang's Castle series, the king is a diluted icon, a ghost. He is wholly missing from Acts I and III; in Act IV, he is overshadowed as a graceful, mild-mannered marionette. Wang, trained as a theater director, understands that absence is not emptiness. Like Chekhov's unseen but potent characters, the king's absence creates tension. But Wang is not telling a story of monarchy or power grabs. True power appears to lie elsewhere - beneath the invisible walls and secret thresholds surrounding the castle, some way beyond its walls, or within the act of creation itself, the invisible forces that both support and disintegrate this world.

Castle is as much about the cost of building as the process of building. Then there are questions plastered on Wang's walls - literal or otherwise: Do walls exist? Where are the boundaries? Is she bonding or bonding-busting? How much does it cost to let some in and keep others out? Is there anyone in this domain who has all the answers? These questions hang over the paintings, shifting between the visible and the metaphorical.

This is not a story of conquest, per se. The king is not the symbol of power; similarly, the castle is a manifestation of curiosity - an inquiry into how space encases us, how we occupy it, and how we attempt to define it. Wang's works quietly but firmly ask questions, inviting viewers into her world to consider the meanings and effects of construction.

THEATRE AND PAINTING:

Distilling the Theatrical from the Ordinary

“Life itself is the most wonderful fairy tale.”

— Hans Christian Andersen

Wang's staging of Castle resembles a theatrical stage. Its walls are curtains, not barriers; its figures are bodies in process, not representations. Many critics cite her background as a theater director as the source of her paintings’ theatricality. But the “theatrical" in her work doesn't spring from her training; it comes from her piercing sense of what she sees, imbuing it with meaning and framing the most quotidian moments to look like extraordinary tableaux. This need injects tension into her work, which exists not only in the imagery but also in the process - an artist obsessively distilling meaning from life's chaos.

Act I - The curtain goes up, but the play hasn't started. A girl puts on her ballet shoes, a blank canvas behind her. This is a drama of anticipation - a castle looms in the distance, an unresolved query. It represents a constant, expectant energy.

In the foreground, figures are actors in waiting. Their actions are halting, and their roles are unclear. Meanwhile, the audience in the background waits; they are passive but steadfast. This gentle play of preparation, pause, and readiness reveals the implicit anxiety that ripples through Wang's work: The artist is never entirely prepared to start nor genuinely prepared to conclude. Painting, like life, is an exercise in advancement amid vagueness.

In Act II, the scene gives way to a ritual. At the center of it all is a girl armoring herself with a brush drenched in red ink to wage war on creation. Triangles - a frequent motif in Wang's visual lexicon - imply a yearning for stability, an effort to create geometric order amid the fluid chaos of figures. At the top of the canvas, a pair of women outfitted with swan headdresses, seem to lock eyes in mute confrontation, with none of the rages of conflict. They are cohabitation instead of contention, their stillness a tenuous armed truce against the immense strife of the piece.

Act III destroys this delicate balance. A girl with short hair crowned crooked smokes, her figure framed inside the painting of the painting. In it, Wang depicts the fraying of power and the misdirection of narrative. She is the protagonist of this revelry, yet the "painting within a painting" is a kind of absence, too - power becomes evasive and imbued with mystery again. The triangles now are fractured, their edges melted into surrounding chaos. Power hasn't evaporated; it's evolved. At stake in this transfiguration, the artist meditates on the cost of power: erasure is a given, its remaking tender yet indeterminate - an endeavor that comes without clarity.

In Act IV, the king finally arrives - but not as a monarch, but instead as a theatrical puppet, a manifestation of gratitude and acknowledgment from the creator. A distant castle has vanished, replaced by a capricious, childlike structure of simple lines - the work of fantasy, not ambition. The swan-headed women of Act II have transformed into two painters with palette knives, located to the right on the frame of the canvas. Once more, there is no conflict, only quiet coexistence - an act of collaborative creation. This newly constructed king is commensurate with the castle: a vulnerable, transfixed terrain, its foundations set not in dominion but in investigation, a refusal, perpetual inquiry.

Bodies, Selves, and the Wild

“A man's work is a long road to rediscovery,

through the labyrinth of art,

of the two or three great and simple images that first opened his heart."

— Albert Camus

The figures in the paintings of Wang You are not just the castle's denizens - they are its scaffolding, mortar, and foundation. Ethereal and spectral, they hover between presence and absence, performance and being. Her paintings never show middle-aged people, only the extremes of youth and decay: the vibrancy of life and the gradual fading of brilliance. These are not people but types, evocative of Pina Bausch's notion of an “atmosphere that transcends body and space.”

In Wang's work, bodies neither belong to themselves nor are one thing or the other. Rather, they are crucial lines and shapes that give equilibrium to the rhythm of the composition. Be it human or animal; their number appears dictated by the canvas itself - a space calls them into being. However, This relationship is fraught with tension: space determines and prohibits the bodies, defining limits, while the bodies construct and animate the space. They are in a dynamic state of mutual shaping and reshaping.

Animals - swans, zebras, leopards - drift in these paintings. Neither fully wild nor truly tamed, they move tentatively but confidently. Are they companions, literary devices, or solo acts? Their presence suggests a precarious balance between instinct, artifice, and nature and stage. Like the human figures, these animals represent an unsettling but inevitable coexistence that reflects back the spaces they occupy.

These bodies and animals compose a delicate but definitively unruly universe. Their shapes are not incidental but bound up with the castle's configuration. In Wang's works, bodies are more than vessels; they are boundaries, bridges between past and present, and the force behind creation. They manifest as walls and hallways but exist as walls and hallways, a virile castle filled with virile virulence.

Fluidity:

Do Construction and

Dissolution Go Hand in Hand?

“Art is not a mirror held up to reality, but a hammer with which to shape it.”

— Bertolt Brecht

For Wang You, painting is not just a medium but a ritual: a process of construction and destruction, a response to the cyclical order of existence. The four acts of Castle were also written simultaneously - a conscious decision to keep them all on even footing with one another. This synchronicity doesn't deny narrative but affirms its fluidity: no act is before or after another; each is both beginning and end.

They are not pieces of convenience or once-methodical panels. Rather, they convey the artist's unease with the chaos of the creation process. Wang confines herself to the most straightforward instruments, forcing herself to reckon with the act of making in its essential state. She sees this limitation as both a challenge and a gift. The painted figures, some of which resemble her but aren't self-portraits, expand that offering. Their shapes and gestures function for the composition, not as autonomous entities but as strokes, lines, and colors that are part of the castle's fabric, as essential as its walls.

In Act IV, when the king is “constructed," his marionette body resembles the labor of painting itself - a fight to wrest form from chaos, a fight to create something only for it to dissolve into the background.

Wang's process is slow and unadorned, but it becomes a performance of its own, staring down the absurdity and elegance of making things. If, as described, a painting serves as an endpoint within Act I, returning to the blank painting empowers Wang to question the endpoint of creation itself. The response is pure negation and absence, yet absence itself is flesh and blood. The answer, maybe, is a mirror - in which there is no showing of dominion, only the unknown beauty of construction, of dissolution, of fluid existence.