Bridge of life

An artist's new show captures his spirited journey from Yichun to Beijing. Lin Qi reports.

Although he didn't attend a fine-arts college, Wang Mai, 45, was one of the youngest artists who participated in the emergence of Chinese contemporary art in the early 1990s.

Wang came to Beijing in 1990 after finishing high school in Heilongjiang province. He studied in a training class in preparation for the prominent Central Academy of Fine Arts' entrance exams.

He says he soon realized that he couldn't pass the rather difficult tests. So, he moved into the Yuanmingyuan artist village in the capital's northern suburbs.

The colony was home to vanguard artists, poets, musicians and critics from across the country between the late 1980s and 1995. Many are now important figures in art circles, such as Fang Lijun and Wang Yin.

These academically trained artists became Wang Mai's mentors. The dynamic exchanges among such artists nourished his mind.

Later, he launched a career of his own - painting, creating installations and composing poems.

Wang Mai's progress in oil painting over the last two decades is marked by Spring Comes Back in a Magic Hand, an exhibition now running at the Beijing Minsheng Art Museum.

In the title, the character "spring" (chun in Chinese) has three meanings: his hometown Yichun, a forest-enveloped city bordering Russia; a fascination with remaining forever young in the practice of Taoism; and a pursuit of youthful beauty held dear by modern-day consumers.

In his expressive, energetic works, Wang draws on childhood experiences - dense pine trees, thick snow, ice skaters and such natural specialties of northeastern China as lingzhi mushrooms (glossy ganoderma).

He juxtaposes these elements with beautiful girls, a reflection of the pop culture of nyushen (pretty women admired as goddesses). He thus creates absurd, surrealistic scenes that underlie people's anxieties and perplexities in an open but also rather commercial world.

Wang Mai goes further to dwell on the roles of petroleum and gold in international trade, aeronautical advances and technological breakthroughs. He notes that, while industrial progress has improved the world, it also creates environmental issues and "fast food" cultures, which do not look beautiful at all.

In Clone Family No 2, Wang Mai portrays himself, long-haired and bathed in neon light, holding a cloned baby of himself. He painted it in 1997, a year after Dolly the sheep was the first mammal to be successfully cloned.

"It (the painting) is a declaration that, when people transform themselves or are being transformed, they should gain independence in judgment and not be 'cloned' spiritually," he says.

Wang Mai also demonstrates a full-bodied perspective of the grassroots. For example, a young diaosi man recurs in his paintings. The Chinese term refers to people who consider themselves losers in a highly competitive society.

"This is me," Wang Mai says, pointing to the man in the paintings.

Because of his early migration to Beijing, he says he empathizes with today's young city dwellers, who work so hard but their dream to be decent, glamorous and rich is enormously difficult to realize.

"When we look at the dates (of creation) on Wang Mai's works, we will know that he has been in the forefront of the realm of painting," says Philip Tinari, director of the Ullens Center for Contemporary Art.

Wang Mai held a solo exhibition at the Beijing-based institution in 2012.

Tinari says Wang Mai has been renovating his motifs, approach, colors and compositions, while he remains concerned with changing social realities, and these topics of urgency are well-presented in his works.

Contact the writer at linqi@chinadaily.com.cn