Wang Guangle

Wang Guangle (b. 1976, Songxi, Fujian Province, China), a pioneer of abstract and conceptual painting among his generation, studied at the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing, where he began exploring the potential of the painting surface as integral to his work. In 2003, he co-founded N12, a collective of twelve fellow graduates who began showing together as a means of securing exhibition space at a time when emerging Chinese art had yet to assert its place in the art market or critical discourse. The group came to represent a generation of diverse artists who developed their work two decades after the Cultural Revolution, unified by a break from formal representation toward individual expression. Wang quickly garnered critical praise for his process-based paintings, wherein the artist translates abstract qualities of the world—such as the passage of time—into paint, simultaneously referring to the materiality of the medium and the act of painting through abstraction and repetition.

Guangle’s work has been presented at a number of venues, including the Beijing Commune (2009, 2011, 2015), and the Soka Art Center, Taipei (2011). Since 2000, his work has been featured in over ninety group exhibitions, including China’s ReVision: Focus Beijing, Ludwig Museum, Koblenz, Germany (2008); Prague Biennale (2009); Busan Biennale (2010); Spin: The First Decade of the New Century, Today Art Museum, Beijing (2012); ON | OFF: China’s Young Artists’ Concept & Practice, Ullens Center for Contemporary Art, Beijing (2013); California-Pacific Triennial, Orange County Museum of Art, Newport Beach (2013); 28 Chinese, Asian Art Museum, San Francisco (2015); and Constellation, Dimitri Shevardnadze National Gallery, Tbilisi, Georgia (2017).