WANG XINGWEI 王兴伟

Wang Xingwei is among the most intellectually rigorous and stylistically unpredictable painters to emerge from Chinese contemporary art. Since the early 1990s, he has forged a practice defined by deliberate refusal of a fixed visual identity – moving freely between academic realism, socialist realist conventions, Art Deco, surrealism, and cartoonish simplification, treating style itself as a material to be appropriated and subverted. His work populates theatrically absurd scenes with a recurring cast of sailors and nurses, creating a world social roles, cultural conventions, and art historical references collide with dark humor and disarming tenderness.

Pink Swan, 2025

New Rowboat in Stone Series

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, rendering figures in novelty pedal boats against classical landscape backdrops — the kitsch of contemporary mass culture set against the deep pictorial traditions of Chinese painting. The new series in stone, Wang Xingwei’s iconic figures from New Rowboat are materialized into Swan, 2024 and Dog, 2025. Carved in white Carrara marble, Swan depicts a woman seated in a swan-shaped pedal boat and her form is distilled to its most elemental geometry beneath the graceful arc of the swan’s neck. Dog, 2025, realized in grey Canaloni marble – a denser stone selected for its structural capacity to support the sculpture’s more complex engineering – captures a man reclining with a book in a dog-shaped boat, that is surging forward on a base of stylized waves. The latest work, Swan in Rosa Portugal marble, renders the same composition a warmer, more sensuous material. This variations are entirely consistent with the artist who has made the restless re-examination of his own imagery a defining method. 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 cartoonish figures into sculptural volume and giving physical form to the absurd, tender theater of contemporary life.