FEATURED ARTIST WANG Xiaoshuang

The graceful body and living landscape of urban women

While studying at the Chengdu Academy of Fine Arts of Sichuan Conservatory of Music, Wang Xiaoshuang has shown her soft yet independent artistic personality.Since her debut at the Chinese Contemporary Art Exhibition around 2010, she has attracted tremendous attention with enthusiastic expectations from critics and peer artists.Especially after the series of Urban Mindand Free, Wang Xiaoshuang was regarded as one of the representative artists of the contemporary Chinese women’s easel painting among peers born in 1980s.

“If life is a play, then the environment in which we live is the stage. The city here is full of tall buildings, busy traffic, convenient life, fast consumption, busy, dense and unfamiliar people. We live in a box-like house, separated by a wall from the top and bottom, but we don’t know each other. Everyone has one in their heart. The defensive line is always lonely and alienated. We gather here from the north and the south, chasing a common life pattern, and have a high degree of enthusiasm and curiosity about unrelated things. We yearn for the beauty of the world, but in fact, everyone can’t escape the fate of death, but even In this way, we still yearn for a more exciting life. As existentialism believes, although everything is meaningless, we still have to constantly pursue the meaning of life. Therefore, whether it is busy or alienated, it is just an individual living state. Everything is both hidden and visible.”

“When I was in middle school, my classmates gave me a book on the aesthetics of the human body. This book evoked my fanatical love for women’s bodies. I must look for such books as soon as I arrived at the bookstore. I remember at that time I didn’t know if it was because it was conservative or the books were more expensive, so they were locked in glass cabinets. When the clerk opened the cabinet, she always looked a bit strange when she looked at me. Maybe it was because I was young. To me, the human body is actually no stranger. I started living in school when I was eleven, and I have seen a lot of girls’ bodies, especially in the bathroom, where various fat and thin developing bodies are unscrupulously displayed there. It is youthful and rebellious but clean and simple. There are no compartments in the bathhouse, and everyone is used to it, and it is not embarrassing. My initial impression of a woman’s body should be in such an environment, obscure, clean and beautiful. Therefore, this kind of image is often used in creation. I think it is an initial simple, without modification, only skin, lines and faint emotions, just like the first time in the world, and then slowly covered with dust, because clothing always There are certain symbolic meanings. Most of the time we are accustomed to having different clothes on different occasions. That is the side of the social attribute, the side that we want to show. Under the package of these clothes, there are hidden That part constitutes a whole person. There is no good or bad only complicated factors carved out by time and environment. I think life should be such a complex, not only beautiful and simple, but also lonely, desolate and stubborn.”