Wang Zhiyuan:I have nothing to say and I am saying it

Obliged Dialogue

How should we express the world we perceived? Or, how should we express that part of world we cannot perceive?  

The summer of 2015, when Shen Linghao (artist Zero Shen) emailed me some images of works by Wang Zhiyuan who was studying at San Francisco Art Institute, and I remember those works were serious of 36-color and series of Untitled. The works were mostly dark (almost all black only a few were white) toned and non-figurative, so the audiences need to be very patient to observe the underneath drawings which are carefully sketched on the edges of the panels in continuous tones. Better to describe them as a confrontation between force and force, energy and energy than just vertical and horizontal lines. They are in fact the generalization of the world he perceives with his own method. For Zhiyuan's works, it is impossible to generalize in one word, and the audiences need to slow down their pace with the artist, so they could feel the energy, rhythm and frequency of the works. Malevich once addressed that the key of supremacism is to find an unexpected direction.The works are not limited to the visible world or the Earth where apples fall on the ground, but they open up another kind of time, space and possibility. By coincidence, I curated a group show in 2015 with Zhiyuan’s works included, and the title of the exhibition was "Inner Clarity".

As 20th century philosophy and art pioneers mentioned: the world of art does not belong to Earth and its physical laws, but for all mankind and universe. As time passes by, we will eventually understand that the purpose of existence of art and artists is to elaborate things that we cannot understand now.For Wang Zhiyuan, this resistance to inertia and this opening up for hidden horizons are his destiny, and everything seems just a beginning now... 

Christina Y Z