Wang Wei

Trained in fresco painting at the Central Academy of Fine arts in Beijing in the 1990s, Wang Wei belongs to the generation of artists who gained the technical training of realist art while consciously departing from its doctrinaire methodology. He and his cohort were less interested in simply imitating images from the Western canon, than in contemplating how the impulse toward realism had evolved and taken expanded forms over time. Wang seeks to foreground the essence of objects and their social and political resonances.  By altering spatial configurations and the position of viewing, Wang’s work can challenge viewers’ awareness of a place.

In the Taipei Biennial 2023, Wang has placed a free-standing wall in the center of a corridor to divide the space in half. Both sides of the wall feature an image composed of hundreds of mosaic tiles. The composition mirrors the view that the audience would see from the large window in the museum corridor. 

These tiles are manufactured in Fosan, Guangdong, and were used frequently in the 1970s and ’80s on the facades of buildings in Taiwan, Hong Kong, and coastal regions of southern China. The inexpensive tiles provide a level of protection from the wet and humid weather in these areas while also serving as decoration for the exteriors and interiors of buildings. The aesthetics of such public decor is grounded in a combination of practicality and popularity, and it has become a unique part of the region’s built environment. Wang chose a mundane area in the museum, one that is often overlooked, as the basis for Mirror, a nod to the quotidian nature of the tiles. 

The work reflects Wang’s mastery of realist image-making techniques while also foregrounding abstract qualities of the materials. The tiles evoke a shared memory of  domestic living spaces held by people divided by borders and ideologies. The extraction and displacement of the tiles from their original context highlights Wang’s fundamental provokation: that what we see depends on how we see.