Victor Wang - The Journey's Virtue Exhibit Catalog

THE JOURNEY’S VIRTUE Pa i n t i n g s by V I C TO R WA N G The Way of the Brush Text by R Freeman

The Journey’s Virtue Paintings by Victor Wang January 16, 2021 - February 14, 2021 MITCHELL MUSEUM New Semantics Gallery Cedarhurst Center for the Arts Mt. Vernon, Illinois GALLERY SPONSOR Hunt & Donna Bonan

WSIU Public Television and Radio

COSPONSOR Doug & Debby Kroeschen

Cedarhurst Center for the Arts is an activity of the John R. and Eleanor R. Mitchell Foundation.

Support for this program has been provided, in part, by the Schweinfurth Foundation and the Illinois Arts Council Agency Copyright © 2021 by Cedarhurst Center for the Arts, Mt. Vernon, Illinois All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing by the publisher.

Works of art and photographs reproduced with permission of Victor Wang and courtesy of sources.

COVER: Victor Wang, The Wings, 2018 oil on canvas 60”x120” INSIDE FRONT COVER: Victor Wang, Gourd in Dish, 2020, oil grisaille demonstration for his students, 8x10”

The Way of the Brush Rusty Freeman, Director of Visual Arts The Way of the Brush is dialectic; it can impose two orders at once, each simultaneously opening related worlds of discourse. Dialectic is a scholarly examination of how contradictions work in unison while maintaining their opposition, yet suggesting positive and beneficial possibilities.

In the paintings of Victor Wang are several differing series of dialectics. Our study opens for analysis and appreciation the individual expressions and connects them to his oeuvre and his broader philosophy of life.

The ephemeral and the eternal are aspects of Chinese philosophy and theology. The art of painting is China’s most revered art with landscape painting its most respected form of painting. The Chinese word for landscape is 景觀, jǐngguān, or “mountain-water.” The term embraces the polarities that inform and make resonant the idea of what is a landscape.

Chinese philosophy saw correspondence between the virtues of Nature and the virtues of humankind. “To paint a landscape is to paint the portrait of Man.” 1

Emblematic of Wang’s “goddess” series, headdress of wings-in-motion, note, in the left and right corners — additional narrative scenes. The Wishing Wings, 2019, oil on canvas, 50”x62”.

The interaction between mountain and water is indicative of a universal process of transformation that influences and constitutes humankind. The ancient Chinese cosmology of Yin-Yang demonstrates how any dialectic, such as mountain-water, functions in complementary and counterbalancing ways.

The governing model of the dialectic is the presence-absence polarity. This linguistic model thematically relates to the East’s conception of Emptiness.

Emptiness is an ancient concept that Taoism helped bring to the forefront of philosophic

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Dialectics of the Brush. These two details, Realism-Abstraction, show Wang’s visceral use of paint to forge content. Both from The Guardian, 2018 oil on canvas 60”x48”.

endeavors. Emptiness works through yin-yang and with Ch’i, known as the vital breaths, the animating life force of the universe. Emptiness connects and integrates mountains and water.

In Chinese landscape paintings clouds represent emptiness, which connect the mountains with the sea. A circularity occurs.

Eastern thought regards Mountains and Water as being in a relationship where one is never considered without the other. A chapter from the Tao Te Ching clarifies: “Being and non-being create each other./Difficult and easy support each other./Long and short define each other./ High and low depend on each other./Before and after follow each other.”2

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WANG DIALECTICS Twin dynamics are found in Wang’s very application of the paint itself. How Wang uses paint is the most visceral and best example of how the dialectic functions to forge content.

Realism-Abstraction. Wang paints a very convincing and original style of realism. He also paints a very good style of abstraction.

Together, the opposing styles inform each other’s significance. Wang is not interested in copying nature. He enhances his realism through color abstractions and surface textures enlivening the entire frame of the canvas with visual, moving energy. Wang’s abstract backgrounds provide an important contrast for the realistic figures in the foreground. The abstract backgrounds may function as clouds do in Chinese landscapes; as an animating lifeforce bestowing life and connecting all. His brush brings together hundreds of varying, dialectical strokes: thick-thin, calm-active, smoothness-roughness, fast-slow, light-dark, shallow-deep, harmonious-discordant, orderdisorder, simple-complex, coherenceincoherence, small-great, expansion-contraction, near-far, pattern-shapelessness.

Realism and Abstraction work together in a Wang painting as the viewer “reads” the surface moving from the realism to the abstraction unconsciously appraising, identifying, and translating one style and then the other into linguistic and emotional meanings.

Sculptural-Illusionistic. Wang layers paint creating a literally elevated sculptural surface of paint and color. Wang’s impasto method builds the surface while retaining the character of the brushstroke. Wang has said, “The texture and earthiness on the canvas’s surface are inspired

by the soil on the [labor] farm I worked in China.” Typically, Realism creates a 3D illusion using the two dimensions of the canvas.

Wang’s sculptural textures and 2D illusions work together emphasizing Wang’s intentions to create a vision beyond reality.

Wang’s dual approach to form and content is able to reflect dualities of an even greater context. His dual approach may be compared to Baudelaire’s dual characterization of modern life: “By ‘modernity’ I mean the ephemeral, the fugitive, the contingent, the half of art whose other half is the eternal and the immutable.”3 Wang paints the dynamic forces of the ephemeral intertwined with the eternal.

Wang’s iconography and visionary paintings unfold with all the power and force seen in the social and cultural complexities of today’s world. Wang’s paintings have emotional power conveyed through the artist’s broad knowledge and techniques of oil painting. Oil painting is a

The Rat Year Plague hauntingly captures the anguish currently engulfing the planet. The Rat Year also commemorates the birth of the artist’s first granddaughter. Wide-eyed innocence naively, vulnerably stands alone against the enormous dark swirling storm of today’s world as medical responders fight valiantly rescuing pandemic victims. The Rat Year Plague, 2020, oil on canvas, 60”x96”

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versatile medium capable of conveying a wide range of human expressions and moods.

Wang’s iconography and skills in oil painting originated in his homeland of China.

subjects. His paintings implicitly reference early life in China, while melding those early memories into his and his family’s life in America. A dual way of seeing forms.

Beginning in the late 1980s, Wang was determined to make America his family’s home.

Born in China, his father was a theatre actor and his mother a librarian.

The principle theme of Wang’s oeuvre is the journey of life. His inspiration is personal and deeply felt, but I believe these paintings are also expressive of the journey in a broader humanistic sense. The majority of Wang’s subjects are allegorical and wrestle with opposing forces.

His paintings are also influenced by Wang’s knowledge of the histories of the West and East.

Titian is a particular source of inspiration. The Tang Dynasty is also an influence and Wang includes subtle imagery from the Tang in some of his paintings. Tang history is illuminating and to that we turn.

The personally significant symbol; Wang’s beloved, dialectical sunflower. Detail, Rest under Sun, 2000, oil on board, 32”x23”.

Wang graduated from Lu Xun Academy of Fine Arts in Shenyang with a degree in art and taught painting at his alma mater for five years before immigrating to the US. Wang experienced the Cultural Revolution as a young man forced to work for two and a half years in a government labor farm. There he was surrounded by sunflowers. Sunflowers carry dual meanings for Wang. The flower became a political symbol in China representing the people who must follow the leader Mao Zedong as sunflowers bend and follow the sun. Wang as a child also played in sunflower fields.

Portraits, landscapes, sunflowers, family, and the occasional Chinese artist are the painter’s

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HISTORY OF TANG DYNASTY A powerful visual complexity of forms confronts the viewer in the work of Wang that features sources as contrasting as the artist’s own emotion-fired inspirations to his scholarly veneration of the historic Tang Dynasty painting histories of his native homeland.

A brief look at the painting theories and histories of the Tang Dynasty. The Tang are to the preceding Six Dynasties as the Roman era was to the Greek. The Tang’s social and cultural reign was from 618 to 907 and contemporaneous with early Medieval Europe.

Collectively, Medieval Europe is characterized as Byzantine (Roman Empire), Celto-Germanic, Carolingian, and includes the Islamic Abbasid dynasty.

Wang citation and appropriation of Tang Dynasty history in his paintings. Detail, Losing the Battle, 2019 oil on canvas 60”x48”.

The Tang Dynasty art and culture is one of the crowning achievements of China. Economically prosperous, militarily strong, and stable politically, it allowed the coexistence of Taoism, Confucianism, Buddhism, Christianity, Judaism, and Islam. Tang arts and culture flourished in scale of achievement comparable with the Italian High Renaissance.

“Tang art has incomparable vigor, realism, dignity; it is the art of a people thoroughly at home in a world they knew to be secure. There is an optimism, an energy, a frank acceptance of tangible reality which gives the same character to all Tang art.”4 As an adherent to lessons of history of painting, Wang likely knows the legacy of the great Tang painter Wu Daozi. Known for his bravura (furious, complex) brushwork, Wu is

Victor Wang, Sunflower Symphony, 2008 charcoal on paper 60”x128”

“In my childhood years, I played under the bright, yellow sunflowers with my brothers everyday. During [China’s Cultural Revolution], sunflowers were used as political allegories to depict how citizens of China should follow Mao who represented the sun, since sunflowers follow the sun’s movements. People eventually inferred the deception that this symbol masked. After graduating from high school, I was sent to a labor camp in the country for ‘reeducation.’

There, I was subject to grueling farm work.

Often, I worked in corn and sunflower fields from sunrise to sunset. Thus, for me, sunflowers evoke both personal joy and sadness.” Victor Wang

Political poster, Mao, c.1960s. Courtesy of Pinterest. Middle: Ai Weiwei’s Sunflower Seeds website page, screen shot. Ai shares a similar sentiment with Wang.

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to convey the story but more importantly to capture the viewer’s attention in such a way as to say “hey” this is important, pay attention.

Painting a portrait of a person is not the same as what an actor does live on stage. This difference Wang takes full advantage of. Wang creates his own visual style that is somewhat analogous to the drama of theatre but where the physical presence of colorful, thick pigments,

Tang artist Zhou Fang was famous for his depictions of women. Zhou established the standard for noble Chinese femininity.

Place Ladies Tuning the Lute, attrib. Zhou Fang, handscroll, 11”x29”. Twelfth-century copy of Tang Dynasty painting. Courtesy of Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art. recognized for his contribution in creating the thick and thin line expressing movement and the power of the brush.

Like Wang today, who often uses abstract elements into his paintings for symbolic or mood-inducing effect, Wu introduced calligraphic, dynamic brushwork into painting.

THEATRE & THE PEKING OPERA Wang’s father was an actor in theatre and Wang remembers seeing his father perform. Theatre and aspects of its modes of expression are often appropriated by Wang for his paintings. The Peking Opera is another source and represents the maxim of aesthetic rigor over expression.

Among Wang’s many conceptualizations for his paintings is his regard for them as spaces

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similar to theatre where actors perform a variety of symbolic narratives. Or a place where an individual actor performs a cameo foregrounding a mood or creating a kind of aura of personal and symbolic atmosphere.

Wang admires the traditional style of acting of the Peking Opera, a historical theatre in China begun in the 18th century.

Peking Opera stories originate from history, theology, and literature. Often the stories portray a moral message. Most unique for the Opera is its method of telling stories using natural and non-natural (exaggerated) styles of expression and acting. Movie fans familiar with silent films may see a comparison. In both Peking Opera and silent film, the acting is symbolic of gesture and mood and in stark contrast to today’s norm of realism. The acting schools of Konstantin Stanislavsky and Lee Strasberg exemplify today’s realism school where actors “get into character.”

The aestheticism of the Peking Opera is instructive for reading Wang’s paintings. The Opera tells its stories using anachronistic means

Qi Baishi, an influential Chinese painter who modernized the classical gongbi style. Qi initially followed the gongbi tradition; later, he developed a freestyle with lively brushstrokes and playful tone. Victor Wang, The Hero, Qi Baishi, 2016, charcoal, wash,72”x48”

thin washes convey an aesthetic sensibility and storyline all their own. Wang’s deep understanding of live theatre allows him to create robust narratives within a single frame.

Dramatic lighting from theatre and the chiaroscuro from Caravaggio and Titian are also key components in Wang’s repertoire.

There is something about some of Wang’s paintings where he breaks what’s called in the theatre or movies the famous “fourth wall,” the illusion of reality. Wang’s paintings are never intended to be merely realistic. Wang knows realism well and can paint it at any level in oil, should he wish to do so. But he is after more.

He uses realism in a way that fascinates, but he also knows how to break the fourth wall of the canvas using either his own personal iconography or the paint itself as color-rich layers of impasto or diaphanous veils of wash to deftly direct our attention to his cinematic portrayals of an image. The visual richness, expressive colors, and physical textures of the paintings empower his content with experiential values only a painting can deliver.

One can return to a Wang painting again and again and never empty its contents.

Wang intends for viewers to be moved by his paintings, but he also knows today’s complex world requires sophisticated means of presentation to speak meaningfully to audiences.

MOOD The creation of Mood is at the core of what Wang does and one of his most fundamental intentions to create. Mood, a structuring Painting as theatre. Note Tang Dynasty citation.

The Green Mask, 2020, oil on canvas, 60”x48”.

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absence, is one of the first appeals of a Victor Wang painting to audiences. Mood speaks of essence and universal experience. Cinematic, or dramatic lighting is key to Wang’s creations of various moods.

To capture and paint Mood one must objectify it first; Mood is a way of thinking, of working out, of discerning one’s own desires. We recognize, viscerally, the artist’s explorations of the intangible. As you survey the exhibition, there are captivating representations of mood as seen in Wang’s Ideal of Woman. Wang paintings capture, or create, a moment in time. A freeze frame from the film of life.

SIGNIFIANCE Roland Barthes developed a three-level reading of film stills that is instructive for Wang’s paintings. Barthes theorized that a film still could be read at the communication or information level; then the symbolic or signification level; and finally—and this is the level that I apply to Wang’s portraits of goddesses—the “signifiance” level. (Note, it is not the word significance.) Barthes wanted to understand the cinematic still for its qualities of Form without regard to its internal content. He called it “poetical,” “has something to do with disguise,” and “carries a certain emotion.”

Stephen Heath defined signifiance as: the process where the content of a text escapes logic and engages other logics of the signifier. The Peking Opera would immediately recognize this definition of how a cinematic form expresses the beauty of form and how form alone conveys emotions, moods, and morals. Signifiance is art for art’s sake used by actors or painters to

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express the beauty and power of theatrical, or painterly gestures and actions.X Signifiance is yet another level of Wang’s use of art to express the aesthetic power of painting itself.

THE WINGS In what will surely become known as a Wang masterpiece, The Wings, 2018 is a humanistic statement of profound and broad social significance. Painted two summers ago, well before our current crisis of a planet-wide pandemic, this painting presents— magnificently—humankind’s existential and heroic struggle of life. The ultimate dialectic.

In The Wings, the Body anchors the painting and becomes the fulcrum upon which all narratives act. Kneeling and bowed, the warrior is firmly grounded on Earth. Yet, the awkwardly and painfully torqued shoulders force the arms and bloodied, disfigured hands skyward to be bathed in light. The hands begin to disappear into the light. Instead of presenting the stereotypical scene of a man solemnly reaching to the heavens with open hands in reverence or penance, the Body is bowed, torqued, and twisted with damaged hands defiantly thrusting upward. We are defined by our struggles, they mark our Bodies, and dialectically, we exist simultaneously in the light and on Earth. The hint of a transcendental relationship with the great wings hovering above is seen on the arm’s tattoo of feather and shield. A Tang Dynasty warrior stands his historical ground, while a nearly tangible archer aims, hand dramatized in living color, mere seconds from releasing the arrow. Brilliant perspective rendering brings the archer

dynamically into our physical space. Nearby a superb black line drawing shows only the fiercely held pommel and hilt by a pair of powerful raised hands about to strike the coup de grâce. Stunning cinematic action in a tour de force painting. Wang dialectically melds colorrich abstract expressionisms of the highest orders with expressionistic realism of palpable physicality. This painting is stunningly alive with brute force action and violence. Yet, the great wings dominate the painting’s space and suggest the moral high ground for this epic struggle.

THE ALLEGORY OF FREEDOM - THE GODDESS The personification of Woman began when we looked to the sky and named a planet, Venus.

What was the motivation, for that planet, to be selected for that naming? What correlations between the two forms, the two objects, the starlike twinkling planet and earthly woman, would lead to that naming, that symbolism, that correspondence?

Woman as Other is the simultaneously functioning of complement and contrast to the identity of Man. Man, in turn, stands as the Other to the identity of Woman.

The woman in The Journey, 2019 painting, Wang has said in conversation is “the goddess of freedom.” She holds a French horn as attribute.

More on this painting and attribute in a moment.

Woman as allegory can stand for a variety of conceptualizations. For example, Woman may stand as the primogenitor of Family and all its customs, traditions, and raisons d'être. Wang’s

An epic battle wages; see previous page and cover, detail of Victor Wang, The Wings, 2018, oil, 68x120�

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The Journey signifies through the allegory of the everyday woman as the bodhisattva of enlightenment and universal guardian of the promise of liberty.

Wang recontextualized the French horn as the “goddess’s” attribute of progress, modernization, and democracy.

The other figures may be seen as immigrants.

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Victor Wang, The Journey, 2019, oil on canvas, 62”x96”

Wang characterized this painting as “the goddess of freedom.”

This disguise of the bodhisattva using human appearance will be an aspect, I believe, Wang will use for his depictions of goddesses as an everyday, ordinary existence woman.

representations of womanhood feature (Red Dress, 2002 (artist’s wife)); and represent familial pasts (Artist’s Mom, 2020; The Deep Autumn, 2017) and reach into familial futures (A Young Girl Reading, 1996 (daughter); The Rat Year Plague, 2020, (granddaughter)). Wang’s paintings in the exhibition show these multiple readings of his aesthetic conceptions of familial womanhood.

Parallel in function to the ancient Chinese Kwan-yin who remained in the real “everyday” world to help guide, Wang’s everyday “goddesses” are bodhisattvas “dwelling in the fields of sheer vision.”7

Woman as goddess is a social construction, most likely from a man’s point of view. The Ideal of Woman as quintessential Other has been appropriated endlessly to personify conceptions: Nature, Nations, Ships…, as well as the promise of Democracy and Freedom.

Wang’s talents as a draughtsman allow him to register the human face in the precise identity of the model. This reality of identity may in turn cause viewers to assume Wang’s paintings of women are specific people with specific identities.

In these “enlightened” times, we shy away from some constructions on the one hand, and then, on the other, construct them all the same, as in the safe realm of comic books and movies, where Wonder Woman is making a comeback.

“Goddess” does not today stand for antiquated notions of beauty as perpetuated in the glamor fashion industry. “Goddess” embraces contemporary linguistic constellations of terms orbiting around “authoritative, capable, equal, leading, unconventional, creative, intelligent, balanced, visionary.”

The social construction of Woman in the East was, naturally enough, the Goddess. Perhaps the quintessential goddess representation is the Avalokiteśvara of India.

In India, Avalokiteśvara was portrayed in art as male, his qualities feminine. Avalokiteśvara became in China, Kwan-yin, and in Japan, Kwannon, and both became portrayed as

Wonder Woman “goddess” linked to Neoclassical architecture symbolism. Jefferson linked the new government to Enlightenment ideals of reason, logic, and order. Sensation Comics, 1942, courtesy Smithsonian magazine. female. In India, Avalokiteśvara was the most popular of the bodhisattvas, a kind of “wandering saint teaching the doctrine of enlightenment.” Bodhisattvas are those who stay on Earth to teach enlightenment and show compassion and infinite patience (indifference to time itself). Living among the people, bodhisattvas assume “at will the appearance of the beings to whom they are appearing.”6

Wang’s portraits of female models suggest a typological reading, one that moves away from exact identification of the model, and toward a reading of the allegory of the goddess.

Consider these “goddess” paintings in the exhibition: The Guardian, 2018; The Journey, 2019; Losing the Battle, 2019; Approaching Storm, 2008; The Wishing Wings, 2019; Girl with Blue Shirt, 2019.

The everyday, ordinary women is an aesthetic defamiliarization by Wang of the over-worn icon of Woman as Goddess.

Wang achieves a second and critical defamiliarization, and renews our attention to a familiar object, for the French horn, seen in the painting The Journey. Here, the French Horn is wonderfully and mysteriously out of place.

Neither being played, nor surrounded by other musicians, the instrument strongly begins to signify on its own. The horn pulses with

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Bodhisattvas are those who stay on Earth to teach enlightenment and show compassion and patience.

Living among the people, bodhisattvas assume “at will the appearance of the beings to whom they are appearing.”

This disguise of the bodhisattva in human appearance is an aspect Wang uses for his depictions of goddesses as everyday, ordinary existence woman.

Parallel in function to the ancient Chinese Kwan-yin who remained in the real “everyday” world to help guide, Wang’s everyday “goddesses” are bodhisattvas “dwelling in the fields of sheer vision.”

Northern Song Dynasty, or Jin Dynasty, Guanyin Water-Moon Bodhisattva, 12th century, wood, paint, 39” height, St Louis Art Museum, Public Domain, Courtesy of St Louis Art Museum

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symbolism. Wang’s strategic placement becomes exceptional, powerful, symbolic. A musical instrument, yes, but something much more.

The paintings of Wang reinvent the American allegory of Freedom as the everyday woman sharing once again with the world the promise of the democratic republic experiment.

Such is the vision of Victor Wang to see, to reframe yet again, the ancient celestial goddess recast into a dialectical relationship as the everyday woman.

Classical music is extremely popular in China today. It was introduced in the 19th century, and was reintroduced in 1976 following the end of the Cultural Revolution. Confucianism, a major religion, was also again allowed. Some see transcultural values in Confucianism’s urge to cultivate one’s self and the study of classical music. From the beginning classical music was popular in China and gained prestige as a potent symbol of the Western culture of scientific progress and modernization.8

CODA The Way of the Brush follows the dialectical path of comparing and contrasting. The Brush is eternal, marking the ephemeral. It teaches without talking.

The paintings of Victor Wang are simultaneously pleasing aesthetic objects and telling historical documents. Read them one way, and you may find Beauty; read them another way, and you may see Truth.

The Journey painting signifies through the everyday woman allegory as bodhisattva of enlightenment and universal guardian of the promise of liberty. Wang recontextualized the French horn as her attribute of progress, modernization, and democracy. The hope for that freedom may yet reach entire nations around the world.

Kwan-yin may be one historical Eastern reference for the goddess interpretation. A second historical source for the goddess is the long history of the American allegory of Freedom.

Since the Renaissance, the New World was personified in Europe as a woman. As America progressed, it developed its own artists, who, following custom, portrayed the new country, at first, as a Native American woman, and later, as a neoclassical princess icon.

American symbol of “Freedom,” based on “goddess” icon. Thomas Crawford, Freedom, 1855, bronze, 19.5 feet height. US Capitol Dome.

See Wonder Woman comic for Dome associations. Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

In 1855, sculptor Thomas Crawford was commissioned to design a sculpture for the top of the Dome of US Capitol. Named “Freedom,” the female figure features the attributes of sword, shield, and olive branch. The headdress combines eagle’s head, feathers, encircled with stars.

The Brush’s dynamics of Realism-Abstraction and Sculptural-Illusionistic are determining forces that engage the Body and the Mind.

Reading their dualisms is an enlightening moment as we move from a realistic detail to exploding abstraction where visceral meaning takes hold. Our eyes move over sculptural surfaces and dive into realisms of images from life. These captured-in-paint contrasting comparisons endlessly emulate the dynamics of our lives.

“The silences in allegory mean as much as the filled-in spaces, because by bridging the silent gaps between oddly unrelated images we reach the sunken understructures of thought.”9 The paintings of Victor Wang are the bridges of thought. It is what The Journey is about.

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Wang reinvents the American allegory of Freedom as the everyday woman symbolizing the promise of the democratic republic experiment.

Left and detail, The Guardian, 2018 oil and canvas 60”x48”.

Page 15: Left, Losing the Battle, 2019 oil on canvas 60”x48”

Top right, Approaching Storm, 2008 oil on canvas 53”x50”

Bottom right, Girl with Blue Shirt, 2019 oil on canvas 42”x40”

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Top: The Deep Autumn, 2017 charcoal on paper, 52”x141”

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Paper Boats, 2014, oil on canvas, 50”x125”

Wang’s representations of womanhood feature Red Dress, 2002 [artist’s wife]; The Deep Autumn, 2017, [artist’s Mom]; A Young Girl Reading [artist’s daughter], 1996; and top right, The Rat Year Plague, 2020, [granddaughter].

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Draughtsmanship energizes the core of Wang’s art. Above, Wang begins The Wings painting.

Right, Skull, 2020, oil grisaille demonstration for his students.

Middle, Masked Man, 2020 charcoal on paper 48”x40”

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ENDNOTES 1 François Cheng, Empty and Full: The Language of Chinese Painting (Boston: Shambhala, 1994), p. 137.

2 Stephen Mitchell, Tao Te Ching, (NY: Harper Perennial, 1988), Chapter 2.

3 “Charles Baudelaire,” Vincent Leitch, ed., The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, (NY: Norton, 2001), p. 796.

4 Michael Sullivan, The Arts of China, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), p. 115.

5 Stephen Heath, Roland Barthes, Image-Music-Text, (NY: Hill & Wang, 1977), p. 10.

6 Heinrich Zimmer, The Art of Indian Asia, vol. 1, (Princeton University Press, 1983), p. 181.

7 Zimmer, p. 181.

8 See “China and classical music: an extraordinary story of growth,” accessed https://www.gramophone.co.uk/ other/article/china-and-classical-music-anextraordinary-story-of-growth Nov. 2, 2020; “Why is Western Classical Music so Popular in China?” accessed https://www.wilsonquarterly.com/quarterly/ spring-2012-the-age-of-connection/why-westernclassical-music-so-popular-in-china/ Nov. 2, 2020.

9 Angus Fletcher, Allegory: The Theory of a Symbolic Mode, (Ithaca, 1964), p. 107.

ARTIST BIO Victor Wang was born in Qiqihaer, China.

Wang grew up during the Cultural Revolution of Mao Zedong (Tse-Tung) of 1960-1970. After graduating from high school and two and a half subsequent years in a farm labor camp, Wang graduated from Lu Xun Academy of Fine Arts in Shenyang with a four year degree in oil painting. Wang was invited to teach at Lu Xun where he taught painting for five years. During the late 1980s, Wang was visiting scholar teaching painting at several American universities including Washington University, St. Louis, and the University of Illinois, UrbanaChampaign. After the Tiananmen Square Massacre of 1989, Wang vowed to bring his family to America. His wife Lucy and their daughter Connie, soon joined him in America.

Since 1990, Wang has been a professor of art at Fontbonne University, St. Louis. The paintings of Wang may be found in many collections around the world, and he is currently represented by Duane Reed Gallery, St. Louis.

CURATOR Rusty Freeman is Director of Visual Arts at Cedarhurst Center for the Arts.

EXHIBITION THE JOURNEY’S VIRTUE: PAINTINGS BY VICTOR WANG January 16, 2021 - February 14, 2021 Cedarhurst Center for the Arts, Mt. Vernon, IL 19