Extraction · Reconstruction

Born in 1975 in Meishan, Sichuan, Wang Chongxue obtained his Master’s degree from the Academy of Art, Sichuan University in 2006, where he studied under Cheng Cong Lin, one of the leading figures in Chinese contemporary art. He is now a distinguished professor and discipline leader at Sichuan Film and Television Academy. His works have been exhibited in solo and group shows worldwide and featured in major art fairs in Germany, the Netherlands, Beijing, Shanghai, Taipei, and Hong Kong. His paintings are held in the collections of the Sichuan Art Museum, as well as institutions and private collectors in Germany, Taiwan, Shanghai, Chengdu, and the United States.

After more than two decades of daily practice, Wang developed his own distinctive visual language—the “Translucency Technique”, which subtly integrates three postmodern strategies: mechanical reproduction, collage, and appropriation of tradition. In his Translucency series, Wang reinterprets classical Chinese imagery such as Gu Hongzhong’s The Night Revels of Han Xizai and Huang Quan’s Sketches of Rare Birds. Birds and flowers—recurring motifs in his paintings—either float on the surface or merge with human figures, half-concealing and half-revealing scenes of festivity. Viewers must gaze through these layered veils of imagery to glimpse the “floating world” once existed.

Art critic Wu Yongqiang refers to Wang’s practice as a “linguistics of the dot.” Each “dot” serves as both a unit of image and a trace of time, embodying the artist’s emotion, labour, and introspection. Over twenty years, his Translucency and Veiling series have demonstrated a persistent exploration of visual language, contributing a singular path to the evolving discourse of Chinese contemporary art.

Selected Collaborations: Prestige Gallery (Singapore); Update Gallery (Germany); Tao Water Art Gallery (USA); Dunhuang Art Center (Taipei); Dahe Art (Taichung); 5000 Years Art Space (Kaohsiung); Yuhong Art Center (Shanghai); Louvre Purple Collection (Shanghai); Van Gogh Gallery (Shanghai); Fermat Art Museum (Chengdu); Liaoliao Pavilion (Chengdu); Nangu Art Museum (Chengdu).

—— Du Xiyun

Renowned curator and art critic, former Deputy Director of Shanghai How Art Museum and Shanghai Himalayas Museum, founder of Art Time magazine

Wang Chongxue received extensive training within China’s art academies. Rooted in nineteenth-century Western realist techniques, this pedagogy cautiously opens itself to the languages of modern and contemporary art. Such sustained academic discipline has endowed Wang Chongxue with a profound awareness of the intrinsic energy of form. Through relentless experimentation, he refines and advances his modes of expression in pursuit of accuracy and resonance. The academy, meanwhile, places great emphasis on historical continuity — tradition is to be studied and inherited with care. Yet how art engages with contemporary life is ultimately left to the individual artist’s sensibility and choice.

Wang Chongxue does not repudiate this system of education nor the lineage of knowledge it transmits. Rather, he remains receptive to the evolving discourses of modernity, acutely aware that the ever-shifting currents of contemporary life exert the strongest pull upon those who inhabit them. His contemplation of art history and his engagement with the present at times diverge, at times converge. Within this dynamic tension, he descends calmly into depth, gradually discerning within human sentiment and social order certain immutable currents — patterns that, through the layered drapery of history, recur and echo, offering the sensitive observer a haunting sense of déjà vu. Thus, in his oeuvre, the renewal of artistic form and the constancy of the human condition become organically intertwined.

Modernism brought with it an unprecedented liberation of form: any form might be valid, so long as it could convey meaning. Within modernism, Dadaism further extended this freedom, allowing anti-art and non-art to become wild channels for the expression of vitality itself. By now, almost every conceivable form has been explored; innovation in form alone no longer suffices to distinguish. To move and persuade, one must confront one’s lived reality and articulate it with sincerity. The refinement of form and the inheritance of tradition must, in the end, find their grounding in an authentic reflection upon the life of the present. Wang has consciously journeyed along this path.

Modernity propels immense transformations across politics, economics, culture, and technology — phenomena dazzling, even bewildering. Yet human nature itself remains unchanged: the desire of the flesh, the desire of the eyes, the pride of life. When Wang Chongxue perceives this unbroken undercurrent flowing beneath the ruptures between past and present, the traditional sensibilities he has accumulated over years of study merge seamlessly with the pulse of contemporary existence — both in cognition and in aesthetic inclination.

As a man of his time, Wang Chongxue does not depict the images of contemporary life directly. Instead, he turns to traditional iconography for his visual samples, processing them through distinctly modern aesthetic strategies — appropriation, cropping, layering, abstraction, reconstruction, and synthesis. Every artwork, after all, is a sample of the individual, the society, and the age to which it belongs. The classics, having endured the most rigorous selection through generations, stand as the most distilled and concentrated of such samples. The deeper Wang immerses himself in art history, the more vividly he senses the powerful vitality of these canonical works.

Beginning from the dilemmas and experiences of the present, he selects from the vast continuum of art history those works capable of reflecting our contemporary condition. Through his aesthetic reconfigurations, their dormant spirits are reawakened, allowing today’s viewers to recognise anew that “there is nothing new under the sun” — that human nature has never changed. Ancient souls traverse the layered veils of history, reappearing to the sensitive mind as something – profoundly familiar. Yet aesthetics itself remains ever-changing, forever renewing the excitement of the senses. Thus, in Wang Chongxue’s practice, the permanence of human experience and the transformation of artistic form reach a state of organic synthesis.

In his long-running “Translucency” (Tou) Series, Wang Chongxue extracts specific visual elements from ancient paintings and reorganises them — sometimes in structured, sometimes in spontaneous arrangements — while the original imagery recedes quietly into the background, faintly perceptible only upon close observation. Both the extracted elements and their underlying “sources” undergo transformation in colour and texture, embodying the sensibilities and methodologies of contemporary art. The relationships among these components, whether overt or implicit, reveal the artist’s own contemplations: at times directed toward the human condition, at others toward broader cultural or moral concerns. As his focus shifts, so too does his formal language evolve.

The rise of modernity — particularly the acceleration of technology — has opened an ever-widening gulf between contemporary life and the traditional world. In Wang Chongxue’s paintings, ancient imagery, once rationally abstracted and geometrically reconstructed, becomes almost unrecognisable, as though to assert visually the magnitude of that separation. Yet when one attends closely to the minute sections — to the delicacy of each mark and brushstroke — the pulse of life persists, vivid and rhythmic upon the surface, scarcely different from the gestures of artists of earlier generations.

In his more recent “Veiling” (Mai) series, Wang Chongxue isolates fragments of distant mountains and vast waters, reproducing them through a technique reminiscent of halftone printing, rendering a surface of cool, impersonal rationality.

Yet within these painstakingly hand-drawn dots — through their unceasing repetition and subtle modulation — his emotions and aesthetic sensibility quietly unfold. The human reverence and longing for nature rise and fall within the interstices of post-industrial rational order. Wang Chongxue himself articulates this process of making with lucidity: “It is an act of meditation upon the classical spirit — an expression rendered through the most direct and human language. This natural and immediate mode of articulation, accumulating through repetition, ultimately gives rise to a visual sensation akin to the sacred.”

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—— Rick Shi

Curator, Art Critic, Artist

Over more than two decades, Wang Chongxue’s painting practice has evolved from classical imagery toward a language of abstract spirituality. His early “Translucency” Series reflects a concern with formal experimentation: by “re-painting through” fragments of ancient paintings, Wang investigates the dual space of image and concept. These works, though visually archaeological in structure, already reveal a latent quest for autonomy in visual language. As his work matured, he began to introduce repetition, rhythm, and order into his compositions—formal strategies that echo German Expressionist ideals of “primitive form” as a vehicle for spiritual experience. Expressionism seeks to penetrate reality through inner vision rather than depict it externally; in Wang’s technique of “translucency”, this idea takes form through the interplay of dot and line.

Wang’s so-called “dot-through method” is not merely a technical innovation but a conceptual stance. It begins with the dot as a fundamental unit—layered, absorbed, and permeated until the original image dissolves and reconstitutes. The dot becomes an “energy particle”: both the origin of image creation and a symbol of mental condensation and dispersal. Through this process, classical subjects such as Gu Hongzhong’s Night Revels of Han Xizai or Huang Quan’s Rare Birds are reabsorbed into a modern painterly language. The classical image is no longer representational but is transformed into pure visual energy. This act of “consuming” and remaking becomes, in essence, a rewriting of art history—Wang uses the dot as a medium to spiritualise and abstract the ancient image, endowing it with contemporary social metaphor.

The “Translucency” and “Veiling” series form two poles within Wang’s oeuvre, engaging the dialectics of revelation and concealment. The former, through layering and chromatic translucency, explores visual permeability andspiritual flux; the latter employs concealment and erasure, where the absence of the subject becomes the generator of meaning. Viewers, unable to “find” the theme, are compelled into active interpretation—a process resonant with Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of the “visible and the invisible.” In the gaps between perception and obscurity, meaning is awakened. Wang’s strategy of “visual repression” in the Veiling series turns painting into a metaphor for social and informational opacity, elevating a formal concern into a philosophical reflection on the condition of visibility.

In his recent works, Wang attempts to merge the two methods, pushing the “dot-through” technique toward a more philosophical abstraction. Here, the dot becomes cosmological—forming mountains, water, and energetic flows that embody both temporal and spiritual dimensions. This abstraction connects his work with Western modernist traditions. The oscillation and accumulation of coloured dots recall Neo-Impressionist optical theories, yet unlike Georges Seurat’s scientific rationality, Wang pursues emotional and spiritual resonance. His dots articulate not visual optics but a language-space. Like Cy Twombly’s gestural inscriptions that blur painting and writing, Wang’s dots mediate between mark and meaning—they point to language yet transcend it, material yet symbolic.

Thus, the dialectic of “translucency” and “veiling” in Wang Chongxue’s art is not merely formal but philosophical—a meditation on the relationship between image, language, and society. Through his “dot-through” grammar, he dismantles and reconfigures the boundaries between classical and modern, visible and hidden, sensory and spiritual. Grounded in the ethos of Eastern painting yet infused with Western abstraction and expressionism, Wang’s practice transcends technique to enter a cross-cultural realm of visual thought. His works reveal not only the self-generation of pictorial language but also how art, in the contemporary age, can once again attain intellectual depth and spiritual gravity.

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