Asia Art Center is honored to announce that  “If Two, Then One: Wang Shaoqiang Solo Exhibition” will be held from July 24 to September 12, 2021. This exhibition is curated by Zhang Zikang, director of the Central Academy of Fine Arts Art Museum, displaying more than 30 works by the artist Wang Shaoqiang. From the three dimensions of science, history and aesthetics, it systematically presents the artist’s experimental exploration and practice of ink and wash.

Wang Shaoqiang was born in Guangdong Province in 1970. He has multiple identities including artist, curator, museum curator, professor, and doctoral tutor. These cross-border and diverse identities stimulated his thinking about regional culture and emotional connection. Wang Shaoqiang’s works also highlight his enrichment and sublimation in different roles in life. In his rational thinking on traditional culture and contemporary society, he constructed his own contemporary “humanistic landscape”.

Wang Shaoqiang’s artistic creation has carried out in-depth research and exploration in human geography, Chinese and Western philosophy, ancient painting theory, and ink and wash materials. Continuing the in-depth discussion of cosmology, Eastern and Western philosophy and aesthetics at the level of iconology in the ink and wash managed by the After Hill, Wang has been looking for the inevitability of existence and interdependence of everything between tradition and modernity, as well as commonality of the East and the West. These elements merge together to present the grand atmosphere of the world and the sense of vicissitudes of life. Starting from the fusion of the differences between “form” and “meaning”, he tried to transform different developmental processes and ideological concepts of Eastern and Western art in pursuit of the natural harmony of the universe. In his language exploration, he draws on the artistic conception of ink and wash. Through repeated superposition and accumulation, he integrates nature and humanities, giving everything a harmonious ecological atmosphere. In his works, Wang Shaoqiang uses the ancient Suduku and contemporary geographic coordinates and other geographical elements to integrate into his creation, forming a unique way of artistic expression, and exploring boundaries of ink and wash creation and find a balance between time and space. For instance, this exhibition displays artworks such as “The Heaven Hangs out Figures”,“Heavenly Light” and “Depth”, as well as the latest creations of the “Decline” series and “Chromatic Hill” series. During these ink and wash paintings, Wang’s expression on form seems quite different from “experimental ink and wash” or “new literati painting”. Wang breaks through the single subjective expression of emotion in traditional literati painting. In his ink experiment, he unearthed the humanity behind the natural objects. When talking about the origin of his ink experiment, he once said: “When drinking tea, the accumulated tea will form a certain concentration, which gives me abundant inspiration. My paintings are actually using this kind of relationship between water and air, water and time to create, which still contains a subjective yearning for nature and mountains and rivers.”

While pursuing a new humanistic spirit and aesthetic characteristics, Wang Shaoqiang combined modern natural science with traditional landscapes to construct a new visual image of landscapes that precipitated time and space.