Strokes of Poetry: “Lifelines” by Wang Huangsheng

Description

“Lifeline” is a term in English that implies the saving of life when one is in urgent need of help and the connotation of rescue is here intended culturally, as a metaphor for Wang’s lines as cultural thread, just as the trunk of a tree steadily grows upwards, supporting all the branches, his lines form the key element throughout his oeuvre.

– Katie Hill, Curator

Wang (b. 1956, Guangdong Province) is the Chief Director of Guangzhou Academy of Fine Art Museum, as well as the founder of both the Guangzhou Triennial and Beijing Photo Biennale. Wang’s artistic practice over the years can be understood as a lifeline and metaphorical cultural thread that is embedded into and throughout this series of works.

During the daily practice of calligraphy, Wang rewrote some of his classical poems created in his youth in the 1970s, infusing colours into fluid cursive script and thereby combining painting and calligraphy into one. The colours blue, yellow and green mark the works’ mood in this series, blended with water and ink on Xuan paper. Through the practice as a daily ritual, the artist is to attain “cultivation” and “enlightenment”. The “chaotic” script where characters overlay each other contains the artist’s classical sensibility, as well as a fusion of aesthetic and conceptual meanings that echo and reverberate with the past.