Why would any of us take up the challenge of the genuine language of fine art when we are bombarded by so many iconic alternatives?  Why dwell on vocabulary such as the selection of line or color?  Why trouble ourselves with whether an artist’s choices function as a timeless window?

Wang Qi Feng’s work over the last decade demands to be viewed in the context of these questions and it is of little consolation that he refuses to define himself as an artist. The selection of paintings in the current exhibition, even with the constraints of limited space, might at first appear to be an open exploration of expressive forms  - an artist trying to find his voice. Not true. The linear structure, the selection of color and the use of pictorial interruption, for example, all follow rules of measured consistency.

Consider some of Wang’s repeated pictorial themes - the blue horizon, the intrusion of abstraction or the descending mountain facade.  These recur representationally both in Western and Classical Chinese (non-perspectival) terms but also in the vocabulary of flattened formalism.  Individual works may reference celebrated moments of expression in the plastic arts but this is by no means a pedantic conceptual exercise.  Wang is in command of his terms and his clarity comes from their consistent and uncompromising application.  The result are works of extraordinary unique deftness and honesty neither seduced by the iconic nor stained by reference or repetition.

Wang’s use of a blue horizon appears in one of the earliest works in the exhibition “20120600” from 2012.  The compelling effect of this piece derives in part from its highly conflicted structure.  The blue horizon near the center of the canvas breaks from the ominous clouds above while an opaque mist persists in the valley below.  The mist at once occludes the near hills to the left but allows a crisp view of the mountains to the right.  The viewer is drawn to this clarity on the right of the canvas even as Wang subtly shifts the window onto the landscape to the left.  The structure of a 2014 work (“20141027”) also employing a blue horizon contains similar representational incongruities. Here the weather and the landscape appear balanced while the blue horizon, a stroke of aesthetic perfection, has no logical representative place.

In an early intrusion work from 2015 (“20150324”) a series of inserted abstractions elevate what would otherwise be a pleasant but unremarkable polemical canvas into something far more profound and interactive. The narrative of the scar of an advertising billboard on a pristine landscape must now contend with abstract chevrons placed at 90 degree angles to each other and presaged by ambiguous pine following the same rotational series.  Viewers are thus denied the obvious lament of occlusion of nature by commerce and instead find themselves struggling to posit content onto a billboard tableaux otherwise content to blend into the mountains and the horizon in the distance.

Wang’s works of more through going abstraction (four of which are in the current exhibition) cannot be understood in the context of 20th century abstraction in Russia and the West.  They present more clearly as character studies developed out of abstract intrusions to earlier representational works (in addition to the 2015 work described above also reference from the exhibition “20211208”, “20211229”, “20220711” and “20221116”).  Structurally the works differ in the varying degree to which they move beyond the linear boundaries in which they first appeared.  What remains to be seen as and when these boundaries further dissipate, is whether they may arc back into the direction of more direct representation.  

A crude characterization if Wang’s work over the past decade into representational, intrusive and abstract silos may be of descriptive value, but it inevitability diminishes the scope and scale of his communicative exercise.  The artist is in complete command and yet unrestrained by his arsenal of structure, line, color and stroke.  The constancy in each work is an effective balance of beauty and meaning made even more seductive by the cross references within the body of work as a whole.

In the current market art is a gravity defying phenomenon pleading for a key to accessibility.  For those in search of instant enlightenment, there is plenty on offer.  Take your pick from the Zen menu of flat, cartooned, polemical or sprayed on digestible nuggets.  Those seeking engagement with work in the longer term may see themselves losing a war of attrition.  Wang’s beautiful cache of expression may not permanently stall the inevitable but contributes mightily to the vision of what art might be.