User:Artinhongkong

Wang Zhibo (born 1981) is a Chinese artist who lives and works in Hangzhou, China. She creates enigmatic oil paintings that depict man-made interior and exterior spaces, which combine Eastern and Western elements. Devoid of human presence, Wang Zhibo’s paintings follow from the Chinese Literati tradition and are creations of the mind rather than actual representations of landscapes.

Early life and career
Wang Zhibo was born in Zhejiang, China, in 1981. She studied at the prestigious Oil Painting Department of the China Academy of Art in Hangzhou, where she gained a Bachelor of Fine Arts in 2005 and a Master of Fine Arts in 2008. During this period she also studied classical Chinese ink painting as well as Western painting techniques. Upon graduation in 2008, Wang Zhibo was awarded the important Luo Zhongli scholarship for her sensitive and evocative garden paintings.

Exhibitions
Wang Zhibo’s work has received nation-wide attention and has been exhibited at various institutions across China, including the Chongqing Art Museum (2008), Today Art Museum (2008) and Nanjing 4Cube Museum of Contemporary Art (2010). She has also been exhibited at the MoCA Taipei (2008), Shanghai Art Museum (2007) and Chengdu Biennial Exhibition (2005).

In addition, Wang Zhibo has held solo exhibitions in Hong Kong at Edouard Malingue Gallery (2013) and in New York at the Armory Show (2013). Her work has also been included in several international exhibitions in Belgium at the Fotomuseum Antwerp and in Geneva as well as Sydney.

Work
At the heart of Wang Zhibo’s work is an aim to portray the impact of human action “in the march towards progress and development for mainland China”. Wang Zhibo specially depicts landscapes as they encapsulate and portray the changes to our surroundings, both public and private. Through the assemblage of architectural and natural elements in her canvases, at times seamless but often jarring, Wang Zhibo illustrates the challenges behind controlling environments as well as the difficulty of finding cohesion. As described by Curtis L. Carter, “like many talented emerging Chinese artists today, Wang Zhibo is in search of a visual language to explore certain complexities of contemporary art and human life”.

Wang Zhibo accentuates this cacophony by way of painting from multiple perspectives. Although not a deliberate rule, Wang Zhibo primarily focuses on how the subjects fit with one another in projecting what she wants to say, which often results in different viewpoints. Wang Zhibo also specifically selected to work in oil rather than another medium to communicate her message: “I find that oil painting as a medium suits me best in terms of how I want to express myself artistically. I want the viewer to react to my work instinctively, as opposed to digesting a text of what I have to express.”. Combined, these techniques lead to a skill, which as described by Dr. Katie Hill, “is technically virtuoso” and lay the foundations of an artistic practice, which “breathes life into an elsewhere”.