Hanwen Wang
Hanwen Wang
Artist Statement
Hanwen Wang (°2000, Nanjing) makes paintings, drawings, printmaking and mixed media artworks. By taking daily life as subject matter while commenting on the everyday aesthetic of middle-class values, Wang seduces the viewer into a world of ongoing equilibrium and the interval that articulates the stream of daily events. Moments are depicted that only exist to punctuate the human drama in order to clarify our existence and to find poetic meaning in everyday life. His works establish a link between the landscape’s reality and that imagined by its conceiver. These works focus on concrete questions that determine our existence.
One hundred and eight thousand miles away
This is an artwork of the largest size I have ever created, 700×1000mm. I got down on the floor and used 10 pens to finish the work. And digital coloring it in Photoshop.
It is about 9000 kilometers from China to Canada, and the meaning of this number was not really felt until I was studying abroad. Strangeness and loneliness are the weight brought by this distance. “One hundred and eight thousand miles away” comes from a sentence in the Chinese classic novel Journey to the West, which also epitomizes my journey to study alone.
Portrait and landscape
Prints and collages
Platform Sutra
I carved these words and sentences with the method of engraving, just like the ancients who invented movable type printing, technique is only the medium, the purpose is to create the ideal work.
These works are divided into two groups, one English version and one Traditional Chinese version. One group of pictures from the beginning of black to the disappearance of white, the continuous and splicing long picture is composed of six units with a height of 2.6m, which is a subjective presentation of “being” and “nothing”. The other group tore up and reorganized the rubbings of the prints, deconstructing another symbol with the existence of unit meaning, which is my inner experience of “本” and “来”. These two sets of works, like a Chinese landscape painting, are more like a mirror, which is inspired by the wisdom of my predecessors. It is a risky creative experiment for me, and it is a tribute to them.
Picture books
Dega&Carla 1 and 2
Dega, the first pet in my life, a Russian blue cat, was raised by my girlfriend and me together.
When the COVID-19 broke out in 2020 and school classes were canceled, we stayed at home every day, feeling the boredom, helplessness, and loneliness in a foreign country that comes with that long period of quarantine. Luckily, we had Dega, who brought so much joy to our lives, and he showed me how a little life grows and how his life is different from ours. Because of our own experience of that loneliness, we also found a little friend for Dega – Carla.
Why do they like to stay at the window and look around? Why do they like to hide from each other? Why don’t they like to stay in the high concrete buildings? What is their world really like?
The more I spent time with them, the more whimsical thoughts came to me, and I even imagined what it would be like to see the world from the perspective of Dega or Carla.
