NOW REPRESENTING
XIYAO WANG

KÖNIG GALERIE is delighted to announce that Xiyao Wang is joining our gallery.

Xiyao Wang was born in 1992 in Chongqing, China. She received a BA from Sichuan Fine Arts Institute in China in 2014, and a BA and MFA from the Hochschule für Bildende Künste Hamburg (2018, 2020).

Xiyao Wang is a painter whose sprawling language of abstract form is forged from a dialectic between the outer expressive gestures of her body as she paints, and the resulting marks generated on her canvases. The energy of both domains – the space before the painting and that of the depicted expanse within the frame of the picture – is captured with all of the vibrancy and vigour contained in the process of each work’s creation. The scrawled graffito of her canvases recalls gestures reminiscent of Cy Twombly but also traditional Chinese painting, where the room divider, or screen, functioned as both device and motif, situated at the crux between two real spaces as well as the imagined worlds represented within a given picture. More than a simple mirror or repository of her actions, Wang situates her painting in this liminal space between her body and its mark making abilities, where each work is more than a passive recording device – it resonates, speaking back to the movements that first brought it into being.

© Portrait Claire Dorn