Lehmann Maupin is pleased to announce the New York debut of Taiwanese artist Suling Wang. Her large-scale paintings and works on paper demonstrate an ambitious attempt to move toward a new abstraction, addressing concerns about identity and location as an artist.
Through the layering of an expansive vocabulary of marks and disparate visual elements, Wang produces dynamic compositions that achieve a synthesis of painting and drawing. The notion of time and memory is introduced by the layers and shifting planes of the painting's surface. Social, ecological and geographical themes evident in Wang's paintings are a personal response to the changing landscape and rapid industrialization of her native island, and to her own sense of uncertainty regarding her place within different cultural traditions.
At first glance, the paintings appear to represent a state of flux, as if environmental forces have continually eroded location. More localized forms begin to emerge and then fragment, disintegrate and mutate. These abstract forms allude to natural elements as well as calligraphic marks. The fluidity of line arranged and superimposed on subtle fields of color are contrasted by bold gestures of color. Organic, textual and architectonic, the paintings are elusive in origin and strangely rendered, appearing like dislocated artifacts, remnants of language or other cultural debris.
Suling Wang was born and grew up in rural Taiwan. She moved to London in 1993, receiving her B.A. from Central St. Martins College of Art and Design, London in 1997 and earning an M.A. in Painting from the Royal College of Art, London in 1999. She has since has participated in various group exhibitions throughout Europe and is currently in many major collections including the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York.