Yun Wang
The Folded Universe
“This world is varied and my works also want to be varied. The inspiration for the folding series comes from new scientific ideas about an 11-dimensional universe. The painting as sculpture is to show the new world view.
I have twisted and folded time and space to make these fantastic worlds visible.”
-Yun Wang
Yun Wang’s parents are both musicians and wanted to give her a musical career. They sent her to Vienna, the city of music. But it was the visual arts that gave her a sense of freedom and joy, and for her, Vienna became the city of painting. She graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts with Daniel Richter (class “Extended Painting Space”) and studied art management at the University of Applied Arts. Since then she has been working as a freelance artist in Vienna. Her musicality is still a decisive element of her work. Her starting point for painting was Chinese ink drawing and calligraphy, two strategies with complementary approaches in the intermediate area of analogy and code, reduction and unfolding. Later, with the transition to larger formats, she developed an oil technique that, through dilution, allowed flowing glazes and the transfer of the values of ink painting to the canvas.
Whatever is offered to us for recognition is provided with the reservation that it is only a sign. An image is therefore all the more true the more it decays, and the more it does so, the more truths it reveals. Yun Wang confirms this thesis for us when she lets her works oscillate between representation, abstraction, and the concrete presence of the medium, playing with our perception while remaining, in an enigmatic yet logical simultaneity, entirely with herself. A cycle of seeing emerges, whose stations spontaneously appear and disappear again, guiding the gaze and releasing it again. This journey of the gaze can also travel the depth axis from atomic proximity to universal distance. The artist’s preferred method of working, the gradual, reaching advance to continuously add or subtract pictorial structure of semi-transparent layers, turns this complexity into something that simultaneously contains chance and high consciousness. The will to create urges above all an expressive, vital colorfulness, which intertwines with the often dancing forms to mutually increasing pictorial spaces. A punctuation that seems both calligraphic and cartographic gives these their support across all changes.
王韵的绘画工作室，Yun Wang, Studio, 1 Minute Art
At the same time, the parts and planes build up before our eyes into precise manifestations of knowledge about nature and man. Yun Wang draws on the wisdom of the art of her homeland, quoting it either directly or in spirit. This, and curiosity as a foundation and secret coordinate system, allows even chaotic systems to break into the visual world. They can show the violation of the previously untouched, the isolation of the previously connected, the disturbance of equilibria, or they lead into the alien dimensions with which natural science and technology relativize our habits of seeing and thinking. Always, however, a painting is Yun Wang’s way to change people’s mood with a magical, emotional story.
