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Wang Nanfei@798 Dashanzi Area Art Place Gallery

Wang Nanfei’s recent works include images of people both in repose and in transition. On one hand, her paintings contemplate the world she inhabits, that of the Beijing metropolis, while on the other, Nanfei sets into motion a surreal landscape peopled by only one inhabitant, a quirky sort of nerdy-nymphet. Both strategies define a contemporary painter whose roving eye turns images of seeming banality into studied and carefully crafted art.

In the show’s series of smaller canvases, she portrays various birds’ eye views of city dwellers embroiled in the everyday amidst grey skies and dusty streets as seen from her high-rise apartment building. The small scale of the paintings mimics this vantage point, as if the viewer is reflecting out of one of the many storied windows. This series depicts anonymous participants in an ever-sprawling urban Beijing.  The dominance of neutral tones portrays the city in a realist manner. The paint accumulated on the surface belies a city in bustling growth, with all of its by-products; gridlock, pollution, personal distance and stress, at times, an almost overbearing sense of individual isolation. 

Nanfei’s naturally tempered and realistic treatment of her subject matter becomes more quixotic with the second, “Grassland,” series of paintings. In them, she presents a single young woman in various haphazard contortions flailing about in a detailed and lush green meadow. This subject is largely personal while at the same time, somehow a stand in for a typical daydreamer caught in an expanse of the everyday. Wang portrays more warmth in this series which the previous one for the most part, withheld (or perhaps, inspired.) The viewer is disarmed by this un-self-conscious display of temperament and is thereby attracted to the overall mood conveyed. 

The two series in the exhibition thus work to inform each other. Wang is almost challenging us to take sides; the unblinking view of Gotham, and its residue, versus a romantic escape with a penchant for the humorous.  Either way, Wang’s vision has something to offer all comers.

For more information about the art of Wang Nanfei, see: www.wangnanfei.com.