The new works included in Obsession, Indifference and Onion Skin, which toggle between instant legibility and utter confoundment were created over the past year in Wang’s hometown of Shenyang, China, after nearly a decade of living abroad. The disassociation and estrangement produced by this relocation is aptly reflected in Wang’s intricate, recognizable, yet indecipherable visual configurations.

In the large, multi-colored canvases, such as Scattered pages or Whisper in the language of flower (both 2021), commercial iconography interlopes with figures seemingly lifted from Chinese scroll paintings, old-school video game characters, amorphous blobs of color, and shifting grounds of patterned motifs.

The starting point for these works is usually drawn from external visual stimuli, such as seductive food packaging found while strolling supermarket aisles, that the artist encounters while out in the world. 

A suite of four grey and brown monochromatic paintings seem to counterbalance these engulfing and saccharine tableaux, offering a glimpse at the former’s inner lining. Weightless wall, Velvet footstep, Planned coincidence, and Moon paper measure roughly the size of an iPad, engaging the viewer at once in a familiar and more intimate bodily rapport. While also derived from the artist’s impressions of her new environs and daily encounters, they are notably less direct in their representation, constituting instead a surreal landscape of the artist’s inner life and experiences.