An Equivocal Contrast

A catalogue published in the aftermath of Wang’s 2023 solo exhibition at the Rockbund Art Museum, Shanghai. It brought together 17 new works, 12 of which forming a Chinese album imagining a dialogue between Eileen Chang and Agnes Martin. For Wang, Chang and Martin are not simply references or influences, but “readymade personalities” invited into her “powder box of art”: figures whose gestures, temperaments, and tones she borrows, reapplies, and reimagines through painting.

The book extends this idea of painting as correspondence. At its center are exchanges between Wang and fellow painter Hao Liang, in which they move freely from Tang poet Li Shangyin to Japanese painter Toko Shinoda, and between philosophy and technique, brushwork and biography, narrative and material.

[publishers’ note]