Zhan Wang, 1962

Born in 1962 in Beijing, Zhan Wang studied sculpture at the Central Academy of Fine Arts between 1983 and 1988 and currently lives and works in Beijing. The artist’s first experiences with art were during his childhood, through the guidance of family members. While he was studying at university, there was a great surge in the art world around the avant-garde movement 85 New-Wave, which emerged in China under European influence. The artist eventually developed his own style, a synthesis of the realist influence of the academy and the modernist approach of the contemporary world.

The “Jia Shan Shi” series, on which Zhan Wang has been working since 1995, takes Chinese culture and philosophy as its starting point. In China, the rock holds a special place as a metaphor. In garden design, its fractured, porous, textured nature symbolizes stillness, introversion, durability, and eclecticism. Chinese scholars have a special interest in rocks as valuable parts of nature formed through geological processes. They have used stones and rocks, which are natural sculptures in a sense, in gardens in cities to represent a connection between humans and nature, in the material and the spiritual sense. Zhan Wang revisits this tradition, considering the historical-cultural background together with the contemporary, bringing a new perspective to the traditional. The artist molds sheets of stainless steel around rocks and brings them together so as to obtain a smooth surface, which he polishes and shapes. Glittering and mirror-like, the steel reflects everything around it, altering spatial perception. The artist makes a contemporary intervention in the traditional, enabling viewers to refresh their imagination and change the direction of material and spiritual concepts.

In his sculpture “Jia Shan Shi 121”, Zhan Wang forms veins, voids, and curves and completes the conceptual transformation of the natural rock through his attention to detail. He shifts the existence of the rock from imitating nature toward creating something artificial, thus enabling us to search for spirituality, which is traditional, in the reflection on the metal, which is real.