In the past two decades, with its narrative feature, Chinese contemporary art has found its position in various cultures. On this position, Chinese contemporary art has offered enough stories, scenes and forms for its cultural identity. There is something that hasn’t been focused on in the long struggle for Chinese contemporary art to achieve its own cultural identity. That is the natural fluid of feeling in the culture. Such feeling distills itself into a form, as well as letting out in the stories, scenes and forms. It is not like the conceptual or formal “form” that we’ve seen in most western abstract art, but rather, an experience or expression. The logical appreciation of the development of the history is replaced here by intuition. Such experience and expression are neither based upon the logical relation between the abstract and the representational, nor upon the analysis of feeling or feeling that has been analyzed. It is the immediacy achieved from the return to the expression of feeling that has skipped over the historical or logical distance.
Wang Guangle’s paintings provoke in us an immediate expression of feeling. In his Coffin Paint series, he brushes layers of paint on the canvas, with the area of each layer “less” than the previous one. But it is just the “less” that makes the “lines” or shades. This is one’s understanding about “less” and contemplation on the void between “time” and “space”. It seems that with the “less” and “void”, Wang Guangle tries to bring us to the opposite of the anxiety generated by the ever-accelerating “development”. In his Terrazzo series, Wang presents on the canvas different types of terrazzo as they are in reality. It is more the transferring of the “object” than depicting something on the canvas. He does not leave any “space” or “distance” for the portraying of the “object”; instead, he sets up a world of sheer “spirit” and “feeling” for the transferring of the “object”. This is both abstract and representational, echoing the spirit of Zen in our own time. It makes us feel lost about the importance of both painting and man himself.
In today’s context, Wang Guangle’s paintings seem to be searching, in the cracks of the development of Chinese contemporary art, for the immediate expression of a general feeling. He attempts to set up a new start connecting such general feeling with “history” and “contemporary art”. His paintings are both traditional and young.
