The Story of a Dream (忘记梦想)

Text: Zhou Yi

Once, an art collector, upon receiving Wang Xuan's painting, emailed the gallery with an inquiry. Despite having seen images of the work beforehand and grasping a basic understanding of the artist's creative approach, he couldn't shake off the suspicion that the physical piece might be a printed copy. This incident precisely encapsulates Wang Xuan's unique painterly concept, even though the technical mastery to "deceive the eye" ceased to be an artistic pursuit after modernism's upheaval—such impulses even carry a reactionary whiff, suggesting regressive taste. Yet from a broader perspective, modes of representation retain their validity within postmodern/contemporary discourse. In the recent past, our participatory reform of every artistic medium has incorporated the viewer's gaze into the work itself as a constitutive element. This experiential model subverts traditional art's demand for the "suspension of disbelief," insisting instead that artistic engagement must stem from genuine volition—the viewer should take mindful steps crossing boundaries between art and reality, rather than premeditated or directed. True interaction implies an epiphany that only arrives in hindsight—this constitutes the crux of contemporary practice. "Transparency," a deceptive anti-strategy, preconditions for such experience. As boundaries between artwork and reality blur, the more "transparent" the presentation, the deeper the viewer's cognitive hesitation grows, culminating in complete ambivalence. Real experience inevitably comes at the cost of comprehension—art history's ultimate exemplar of total transparency remains Duchamp's readymade Fountain, simultaneously the most talked about and least understood work of all time.

Wang Xuan spent over two decades abroad before recently emerging in China's contemporary art scene, who has kept an almost reclusive existence in Munich. His daily routine unfolds with monastic regularity—neighbors adjacent to his semi-basement studio remain oblivious to the artistic alchemy occurring within. Once a prodigious expressionist abstract painter in his early career, Wang now works with acrylics in an unorthodox manner: he forgoes stretching canvases, instead clipping them loosely to drawing boards. This pragmatic setup facilitates his signature process—applying a bleaching agent to freshly painted surfaces, erasing traces of personal touch in repeated washing. Wang has abandoned the abstraction he once cherished to pursue the genres he detested as a student—still lifes and landscapes. His compositions hybridize scenes from art historical sources with forgotten corners of everyday life, synthesized through extensive image research. With surgical precision, he excises temporal markers and personal details—no period-specific elements, individual expressions, no culturally coded objects remain. Wang's technical mastery transforms paint into a mercurial medium that oscillates between abstraction and figuration. His surfaces hum with tension where representational virtuoso meets formalist rigor, creating works that unsettle yet haunt the memory. Each composition undergoes prolonged gestation—he dissects spatial relationships and visual dynamics, sometimes constructing crude maquettes, but never preliminary sketches. Only when the complete schema crystallizes in his mind would his brush touch the surface. This exacting process sometimes culminates in radical acts of destruction—individual works or entire series sacrificed without sentiment, regardless of invested effort.

The tradition of trompe l’œil (literally "deceive the eye") in Western painting employs two-dimensional media to create illusions of three-dimensional reality. At its core lies the meticulous coordination of representational techniques and spatial design—harmonizing perspective with physical space to construct perfect vantage points that eliminate visual discrepancies at specific angles. These works establish optical traps that seek to erase painting's material existence, achieving a kind of "transparency" that declares to viewers: "I am not a painting.” If traditional trompe l'œil constitutes an "upward mimesis" (a technicality that ascends dimensions to merge painting into reality), then Wang Xuan's practice formulates a "downward mimesis"—a dimensional reduction. His works explicitly announce their illusory nature, never pointing toward the real world but instead toward a virtual universe of images. With deliberate artifice, he uses paint and brushwork to mimic machine-generated two-dimensional characteristics, particularly the homogeneous surface of printed matter. This organic-to-mechanical dimensional reduction resembles contemporary dancers imitating robotic movements. Through hacking into and reconstructing instinctive motion patterns (requiring extraordinary bodily control and cognitive awareness), they produce mesmerizing visual illusions. Wang builds from dimensional reduction by reconstructing the materiality of flat images—consciously incorporating inkjet dots, color shifts, overexposure, feathered edges caused by printer malfunctioning, color banding, and streaky omissions from ink starvation. This systematic construction to aestheticize glitches achieves quantum-level simulation of digital image texture (where brushstrokes dissolve into pixels). At close range, the works trigger an uncanny valley effect—the viewer's perceptual system continuously sounding alarms that contradict reality.

Wang Xuan once created an installation where a painting was embedded within a wall, like fragments of ancient murals accidentally revealed beneath peeling plaster in old architecture. This deliberate "partial disclosure" intensely provoked the viewer's desire to see the complete image. Like a skilled Texas hold 'em player, he bluffs to activate the viewer's imagination, while never intending to provide any satisfaction. Engaging with Wang's works is akin to navigating a labyrinth. No painting form contradicts modernism's dogma of medium purity (flatness) more completely than trompe l'œil, yet in Wang's practice, the apparent contradiction between abstraction and optical illusion not only dissolves but generates a remarkable osmotic effect. Viewers are simultaneously drawn by curiosity and suspicion—upon closer inspection, the image appears irreversibly damaged: information lost, temporal markers dissolved, causing boundaries between ancient relics and mundane objects blurred, familiar scenes become estranged, while geographical and cultural coordinates lose their bearings. Wang's creative wisdom lies in absorbing modernism's nutrients while avoiding its toxins. The nutrients manifest in using irony to create detachment, escaping fixed perspectives; he constructs illusions of narratives only to "unnecessarily" expose their fictional nature, thereby deconstructing narrative cores that never truly existed. This double negation achieves a paradoxical equilibrium—neither deconstruction nor the center existed. The "toxin" he rejects is the ceaseless pressure about innovation. He calmly recombines existing visual elements, no longer pursuing formal novelty, and reconciles with painting's representational tradition. In Wang's own metaphor, the elements in his works are akin to the flow of people on a beach—this isn't a meticulously choreographed theater, but randomly generated images by the eye, never once driven by meaning. The artist observes his own creative process with a detached gaze, restraining the impulse to intervene. It is precisely this voluntary suspension of the artist's habitual obsessions and aspirations/dreams that allows his works to break free from the invisible constraints imposed by our time.

Translation: Zhou Yi, Fiona He