Interview with Xiyao Wang by curator and art critic Hou Hanru Below are excerpts from the interview (Berlin, September 15, 2024)

Hou Hanru: Could you walk me through your painting process? What informs the lines, movements, composition, and colors? Are your personal experiences and reading memories reflected concretely or abstractly in your work? Do they emerge spontaneously, or do you follow a particular plan?

Xiyao Wang: For me, finding the most accurate expression is crucial. Sometimes, a figurative depiction does not feel accurate, as it can only convey a specific image. What I want to express is not just a fragment of space, but a fragment of time. When I try to express my experiences or memories from reading, the feelings themselves are often hard to concretize. Sensations of temperature, color, form, or the changing states of life often exist somewhere between the figurative and the abstract. The most accurate expression is the one you can capture in a fleeting moment, like the click of a camera shutter. In that instant, the world appears in a certain way, but even then, it is only a partial truth. What you capture is just a part of the world, a moment of that part, or a fragment of flowing time. That is how I feel when I paint—what I am trying to convey is the part of the present moment that moves me.

Hou Hanru: Your process seems to involve a lot of movement and action. You also mentioned that music has a significant influence on you.

Xiyao Wang: Yes, because there is a crucial element at play here: the passage of time. The perception of time is a fundamental aspect of my work. Movement and music both unfold along a timeline, and so does our bodily experience. Different movements, dances, and music have reshaped how I perceive time. In fact, traditional Chinese painting inherently contains a sense of time, especially in the form of scrolls. Viewing a scroll is a temporal experience. Even in Western medieval paintings, if you observe them from top to bottom, there is a sense of time embedded in the narrative, though it is not always a prominent focus. In my work, however, time is a central concern.