Shiwen Wang

Selected Works

The river returns nothing of what it takes
October 26 – December 21, 2024

Michael Kohn Gallery is pleased to announce The river returns nothing of what it takes an exhibition of new works by London-based, Chinese artist Shiwen Wang. For her first solo exhibition with the gallery and in the United States, Wang presents a series of 10 new abstract compositions that piece together the artist’s recurring explorations of natural life and its impermanence. The exhibition will be on view from October 26, 2024, through January 11, 2025.

In The river returns nothing of what it takes, Wang engages with the relationship between humanity and the natural world, or as she describes it: “the unity of cosmic life.” The river functions as a metaphor for loss, fleeting time, and collapse intertwined with creation. There is a vanitas quality to the paintings; a subtle rot of human interference lurking beneath the iridescence. In the diptych Belakang Mati, an expansive blue is continued into a narrow rectangular panel below where the belly of a fish unseams open in putrefaction– the viewer bearing witness to its decay.

Wang’s dynamic picture planes emerge from her acute understanding of the fundamental fluidity between artificial and natural light. Her earth-toned and aquatic palettes summon an intuitive command of color, while layers of impastoed oils, powder pigment, beeswax, and fragile egg tempera approximate an aged patina. Her subject matter appropriates the familiar – fish, decaying leaves, a boat wreckage – and translates it into the unfamiliar. These recognizable, repetitive relics visualize the compression of time and create complex ecosystems which toggle between the natural and synthetic.

In spatial harmony, Wang’s work fuses together the relationship between the past and the present, and organic cycles of decay and rebirth. The artist explains the exhibition title references a line found in a novel, written by French author Sylvain Tesson, titled “A Life to Sleep Outside”: “The river returns nothing, not even the echoes of a cry.” Wang

writes, “The violence and suffocating helplessness in the face of life’s impermanence aligns perfectly with the emotional landscape I aim to evoke in my paintings. The river is not just a natural element, but a container—both a tangible material and a symbol.”

About the Artist

Born 1995, China
Lives and works in London, UK

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Shiwen Wang (born in 1995 Shanghai, China), lives and works in London, obtaining her MA in Painting from the Royal College of Art in 2021, a Bachelor of Fine Art from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2019 and a Bachelor in Art and Technology from the Shanghai Institute of Visual Art in 2017. Recent exhibitions include Lichtung, ADZ Gallery, Lisbon, Portugal; The Intermission, Issuing Gallery, Shenzhen, China; and On the White Wall: 20 Litres and Exterior Stable Wall Paint, Millennium Gallery, London, UK. In the fall of 2024, Wang opened her first solo exhibition at Michael Kohn Gallery in Los Angeles, CA.