Listen to me carefully, you bunch of snobs, Wang Xingwei is not simply one painter among many in the landscape of contemporary Chinese art. He is the illusionist who plays with your certainties, the storyteller who leads you into a labyrinth of images where cultural references collide with the vigor of a cosmic collision. This native of Shenyang, educated far from the prestigious central art academies, has traced his path with the assurance of a tightrope walker on a wire stretched between East and West, between past and present, between socialist realism and decaled surrealism.
Consider his work “The Oriental Way” (1995), where he replaces the heroic figure of Mao in the iconic painting “Chairman Mao Goes to Anyuan” (1967) by Liu Chunhua with his own silhouette seen from behind. A sacrilege? A profanation? No, a surgical deconstruction of the official narrative. Wang Xingwei appropriates political imagery to subvert it from within, like a virus that rewrites the genetic code of its host. He offers us what Roland Vinçon calls “an image that thinks and makes us think” [1], a critical reconstruction of the visual that exposes the mechanisms of mythological fabrication.
In exploring Wang’s work, one cannot help but think of the theory of simulacrum developed by Jean Baudrillard. “Simulation is no longer that of a territory, a referential being, or a substance. It is the generation by models of a real without origin or reality: hyperreal”, wrote the French philosopher [2]. Wang’s works embody precisely this hyperreality, this vertigo of representation that refers only to other representations. When he paints nurses with their faces replaced by a flowerpot in “Untitled (Watering Flowers)” (2003), or his wounded penguins in “North Pole” (2002), he does not represent reality, but rather our mediated and fragmented perception of it.
Wang Xingwei’s work operates in what I would call a “zone of semiotic indetermination” where signs float and recombine freely, detached from their original anchorage. Take his “Poor Old Hamilton” (1996), where the mustached Mona Lisa (a nod to Duchamp), a shameful Chinese child, and the figure of Richard Hamilton (the father of British pop art) squatting in Chinese slippers like a security guard coexist. This is not a simple erudite quotation, but a true alchemical transmutation of cultural references, a conceptual collage that blurs the boundaries between high and low culture, between East and West.
But Wang’s real strength lies in his stubborn refusal to submit to a single style, to a recognizable “signature” that would satisfy market expectations. “I consider the artist as a factor. He should not be too curious about what is inside the envelopes he delivers”, he declared [3]. This radical position echoes Gilles Deleuze’s philosophy on becoming, where identity is never fixed but always in process, always transforming. Wang Xingwei successively becomes realist, surrealist, expressionist, pop, conceptual, not out of indecision, but out of a conscious decision to resist the reification of his art into identifiable merchandise.
This stylistic camaleonism is not a mere formal game, but an ethical position towards the industrialization of contemporary Chinese art in the 1990s and 2000s. As Giorgio Agamben noted, “the signature is not only what authenticates the work as belonging to an author, it is also what makes the work itself functional within an economic system” [4]. By refusing the stylistic signature, Wang subverts the very functioning of the art market that demands coherent and identifiable products.
Wang Xingwei’s trajectory is fascinating: born in northeastern China, he began painting in the small town of Haicheng, far from the artistic centers, before settling in Shanghai and then Beijing. This geographical journey reflects a constant tension between periphery and center, between marginality and institutional recognition. It is precisely this outsider position (even when he becomes an insider) that gives his work that particular acuity, that ability to see Chinese culture with a gaze that is both intimate and distanced.
In a brilliant essay, Jacques Rancière evokes the “politics of aesthetics” as “the way in which the practices and forms of visibility of art intervene in the distribution of the sensible and its reconfiguration” [5]. Wang Xingwei’s work perfectly embodies this politics of aesthetics, constantly redefining what can be seen, said, and thought in the specific context of post-Tiananmen China and its accelerated integration into the global economy.
Consider his series “Untitled (Old Lady)” (2010-2012), inspired by a publicity brochure for a preparatory course for the entrance examination of the Central Academy of Fine Arts. Wang appropriates this banal image of an old woman threading a needle (symbolizing the “wisdom of old age”) to make nine obsessional variations. This apparently absurd gesture, devoting two years of his production to a subject discovered by chance, actually reveals a deep reflection on the standardization of artistic education and the mechanization of creativity within the Chinese academic system.
The temporality in Wang’s work is particularly interesting. His paintings seem suspended in a temporal in-between, neither fully anchored in the present nor completely nostalgic for the past. This temporal suspension echoes what Jean-François Lyotard identified as the postmodern condition, characterized by “incredulity towards metanarratives” [6]. The grand historical narratives, socialist progress, capitalist modernization, are fragmented in Wang’s work into enigmatic scenes that resist any linear narration.
Look at “My Beautiful Life” (1993-1995), where Wang represents himself in a purple costume in front of a urban landscape in transition. The ironic title highlights the disconnect between the promises of the “beautiful life” and the reality experienced in a China undergoing economic and social mutation. What Wang captures here, with surgical precision, is what anthropologist Arjun Appadurai calls “the social production of difference” in a context of accelerated globalization [7].
This lucidity towards the social transformations of contemporary China runs through all of Wang Xingwei’s work. His paintings are like seismographs that record the identity tremors of a society caught between tradition and hypermodernity. “Shenyang Night” (2018) is perhaps the most eloquent illustration of this: compositionally inspired by Delacroix’s “Liberty Leading the People”, it shows four figures with divergent destinies in the artist’s native city at the beginning of the 1990s. The central character, leaning against a road barrier, looks with despair at an abandoned white flag, a symbol of defeat or surrender.
Beyond the historical and theoretical references, Wang’s work possesses a quality that I would describe as profoundly cinematographic. Not only does he sometimes draw direct inspiration from cinema (as in his paintings referencing anti-Japanese war films), but his way of constructing scenes, framing his characters, playing with light, reveals a sensibility close to the seventh art. This cinematographic dimension has been brilliantly analyzed by Pascal Bonitzer, who writes: “Modern painting is haunted by photography and cinema… It must negotiate with these phantoms, either by exorcising them or by incorporating them” [8]. Wang Xingwei clearly chooses incorporation, transforming his pictorial art into a device that constantly dialogues with other image regimes.
This cinematographic quality is particularly evident in his treatment of series. His variations on a same theme, whether it be the old lady, the penguins, or the nurses, function like film sequences, successive shots that construct a fragmented but coherent narration. Each painting becomes a “shot” in a larger montage that deconstructs and reconstructs our perception of the real.
But Wang does not merely borrow from cinema its narrative techniques, he also adopts its totalizing ambition. As Jacques Aumont emphasized, “cinema is a total art that can incorporate all other arts” [9]. Similarly, Wang’s painting aspires to a form of totality, not in the sense of harmonious unification, but rather of a vertiginous accumulation of references, styles, and temporalities that reflects the complexity of the contemporary world.
This aspiration to totality is expressed notably in his retrospective exhibition at the UCCA in Beijing in 2013, where he chose to organize his works not chronologically, but according to the angle of view of the represented characters: front, back, and profile views. This unprecedented museographic device reveals an acute awareness of the way the act of seeing and being seen structures our relationship to the world. It echoes what Jean-Louis Schefer called “the body of the visible”, this incarnation of the gaze that defines our being-in-the-world [10].
In his series “The Code of Physiognomy” (2019), Wang Xingwei pushes this reflection on the visible even further by appropriating the codes of physiognomy, this pseudo-science that claims to deduce a person’s character and destiny from their physical traits. By playing with these outdated codes, he questions our contemporary propensity to judge by appearances, to reduce identity to an image. As Susan Sontag wrote, “the real has increasingly been understood as that which is shown by cameras” [11]. Wang forces us to confront this reduction of the real to its representation.
Humor plays a major role in Wang Xingwei’s work, not as mere entertainment, but as a tool of critical distancing. His biting irony, sometimes bordering on the absurd, recalls what Milan Kundera described as the “torn curtain” of humor that “suddenly makes us discover the unlikeliness of our situation” [12]. When Wang paints an elegant couple posing in front of public toilets in “A Sunday Afternoon in the Youth Park” (2009), he does not merely make us smile, he makes us reflect on the paradoxes of contemporary China, on the striking contrasts between individual ambitions and collective infrastructures.
What distinguishes Wang Xingwei from many contemporary Chinese artists is that he is deeply local while being resolutely universal. He draws from his personal experience of northeastern China, from the specificities of life in Shenyang, Haicheng, or Shanghai, but these local elements become the vectors of a broader reflection on the human condition in a globalized world. As Édouard Glissant theorized, he realizes a form of “mondialité” that “maintains the presence of peoples” rather than a globalization that standardizes and erases differences [13].
This tension between the local and the global is manifested even in his pictorial technique. Wang masterfully handles the conventions of European academic realism and Chinese socialist realism, but he constantly diverts them, hybridizes them with other visual traditions. His stylistic borrowings are never servile copies but critical appropriations that reveal the ideological underpinnings of each pictorial style.
His ambivalent relationship to the Chinese pictorial tradition deserves to be highlighted. Unlike some artists of his generation who have rejected the Chinese cultural heritage wholesale or, conversely, idealized it in a neo-traditionalist posture, Wang adopts a more nuanced approach. He integrates elements of traditional Chinese imagery while confronting them with Western visual codes, thus creating what François Jullien would call a “space of the between” [14], a place of dialogue and productive tension between different cultural traditions.
This intermediary position makes Wang Xingwei a singular figure in the landscape of contemporary Chinese art. Neither fully aligned with official artists nor completely assimilated into experimental avant-gardes, he occupies a liminal space that allows him exceptional critical freedom. This liminality, theorized by anthropologist Victor Turner as a state “betwixt and between” [15], becomes in Wang a creative principle that informs his entire artistic journey.
What makes Wang Xingwei great is that he transforms the contradictions of contemporary China, between tradition and modernity, between political authoritarianism and economic liberalism, between nationalism and cosmopolitanism, into a visual work of paradoxical coherence. His paintings do not resolve these contradictions, they maintain them in a productive tension that reflects the complexity of our globalized world.
So, the next time you find yourself facing a painting by Wang Xingwei, do not try to classify it into a pre-established category, do not attempt to reduce it to a formula or a style. Let yourself be destabilized by his biting irony, by his unexpected juxtapositions, by his stylistic metamorphoses. For it is precisely in this destabilization that the emancipatory power of his art resides, an art that does not comfort us in our certainties, but invites us to see the world differently, through the prism of an unbridled imagination that transforms the familiar into the strange and the strange into the familiar.
- Vinçon, Roland. “The Image as a Site of Thought,” Cahiers philosophiques, no. 122, 2010.
- Baudrillard, Jean. Simulacra and Simulation. Galilée, 1981.
- Wang Xingwei, cited in “Wang Xingwei Mashes Up Eastern and Western Styles for Witty Effect”, Sotheby’s, June 19, 2013.
- Agamben, Giorgio. The Signature of All Things: On Method. Vrin, 2008.
- Rancière, Jacques. The Distribution of the Sensible: Aesthetics and Politics. La Fabrique, 2000.
- Lyotard, Jean-François. The Postmodern Condition. Minuit, 1979.
- Appadurai, Arjun. Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization. University of Minnesota Press, 1996.
- Bonitzer, Pascal. Decenterings: Painting and Cinema. Cahiers du cinéma, 1985.
- Aumont, Jacques. The Image. Nathan, 1990.
- Schefer, Jean-Louis. On the World and the Movement of Images. Cahiers du cinéma, 1997.
- Sontag, Susan. On Photography. Christian Bourgois, 2000.
- Kundera, Milan. The Curtain. Gallimard, 2005.
- Glissant, Édouard. Introduction to a Poetics of Diversity. Gallimard, 1996.
- Jullien, François. The Gap and the Between. Galilée, 2012.
- Turner, Victor. The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure. Aldine, 1969.
