Wang Ai 王艾
Wang Ai, respected Chinese poet and artist, creates delicate paintings made with rice paper, tea, Chinese ink and special pencils. His art is characterised by harmony and balance. Exuding an ethereal feeling his paintings are both elegant and refined, presenting a thoughtful use of colour.
His work reveals intriguing visual perceptions – they vary according to the distance from which the painting is observed. From a distance the pieces look almost abstract and are reminiscent of Mark Rothko’s meditations. Up close they unveil an extraordinary meticulousness of structure and an unexpected variety of details. Different layers of depth unfurl before our eyes, conveying an almost three-dimensional effect. They exude a dynamic yet calm sense, oscillating between abstraction and figuration.
Wang Ai plays with the power of language, which stands at the core of Chinese culture. He painstakingly deconstructs and re-constructs it by depicting extracts of poems and Buddhist sutras. If one gets close to his paintings some subtle, enigmatic images slowly emerge. Sometimes they are representations of animals, other times they are fragments of landscapes or imaginary figures.
Creating symbolic connections between man, the natural world and society, his work celebrates an unspoken yet indissoluble bond between human beings and nature. A primordial union is generated through methodical and attentive traits, leaving space to different associations and phenomena. In other works Wang Ai comments on social events but always with the artistic sensibility of a poet who filters reality through an ethereal mirror.
