Wenyan Xu began her career in art almost twenty years ago as a BFA student studying in the Academy of Art & Design, Tsinghua University, a top art college in China. In order to further understand contemporary art, she journeyed across continents to study art in the United States. Having completed her M.A. in the Art and Visual Culture Education Program at the University of Arizona, she focused on her artistic process and production. Through the M.F.A. painting program at Indiana University in Bloomington, she is fulfilling her artistic dream. Her paintings had been shown nationally and internationally, including at the National Art Museum of China (NAMOC), China; the Verum Ultimum Art Gallery, Portland, OR, U.S.A; and the M.A.D Gallery, Milan, Italy. Wenyan strives to explore the complementarity between ancient oriental thoughts and western rational method. She considers that eastern culture emphasizes emotion and self-cultivation, while western rational thinking contributes to the most technological advancement today. Her artistic works apply to interpret the connection between Chinese culture and science.
Her current body of work is about space-time and emotion. She decodes painting as a junction between a location in four-dimensional space and the reality, a switch between emotional experiences and disillusionment. Through paintings, she invite viewers to experience a journey from space to time, to engage in the interweaving of emotion and reality, and to be aware of spiritual energy versus the limits of daily life.
In her painting, the human emotion is historical, interrelated, spontaneous, unarticulated and passionate. Emotion, as an innermost power of human, has been spreading the energy throughout the human history and contributing to our civilization. Yet how much do we give credit to this internal motivation? Instead, knowledge, skills and intelligence are regarded as main drivers for the development of society. Wenyan believes that knowledge, skills and intelligence can only build a world in three dimensions. Their product can last and add up throughout the length of time, but cannot exceed it. However, emotion can go beyond the space-time. It can outreach the world of four dimensions, target a location in the chaos of four-dimensional space, and then build a time tunnel, which you had not anticipated but would go later on in your life. Therefore, emotion has different dimension with the reality. It also has a potential energy to change reality, the world in three dimensions.
Reality is abrupt and rational, devoting itself to breaking down and rebuilding our emotions in her paintings. She extracts marks and symbols from the daily life to display a sober and unordered present. They represent rules and laws unassociated with personal emotions.
Wenyan’s paintings utilize an array of elements including acrylic, oil, cold wax, flash powder fiber, wire, sand, resin, and more to capture personal emotion and perspective.
