Wang Xingwei’s celebrated Rowboat series, begun in 2006 and revisited in 2022 as New Rowboat, draws from the visual culture of Chinese public park leisure, portraying figures in novelty pedal boats against classical landscape backdrops — the kitsch of contemporary mass culture set against the deep pictorial traditions of Chinese painting. In Swan, 2025, the iconic figures of New Rowboat are realized for the first time in stone. Carved in Rosa Portogallo marble, the sculpture depicts a woman seated in a swan-shaped pedal boat, her form distilled to its most elemental geometry beneath the graceful arc of the swan’s neck. Above her, the canopy of the boat is sculpted to a thinness that allows light through the stone itself, softly illuminating her face from within the marble. The boat rests on a carved base of gentle waves — the lake made permanent, the water stilled. The warmth of the pink stone lends a sensuous, almost fleshy quality to the figure, a tenderness that belongs entirely to the sculpture, emerging from the properties of the stone itself.

These pedal boats, powered by nothing more than human effort and available to anyone for a few yuan, belong to a collective memory of a generation quietly receding beneath the velocity of modern life. Carved into permanence, the ordinary afternoon on a lake acquires the gravity of a thing that will not return. By rendering the most deliberately ephemeral and irreverent imagery of his painting practice in marble, Wang Xingwei deepens the central paradox of his career: permanence, which he resisted over three decades, has now been granted to his figures with the weight and stillness of stone, transforming two-dimensional shapes into sculptural volume and giving physical form to the absurd, tender theater of contemporary life.