Wang Lei

Wang Lei

China


Born in Henan, Wang Lei received his master’s degree from the Central Academy of Fine Arts in 2010. He is a professor of Fine Arts and Dean of the Department of Fine Arts at Zhejiang Normal University, where he teaches as a distinguished Shuanglong Scholar and supervises graduate students. Wang is a member of China Artists Association and Henan Provincial Federation of Literary and Art Circles.


Wang has held 8 solo exhibitions at museums including National Art Museum of China and Henan Art Museum and participated in more than 200 joint academic exhibitions at home and abroad. He won a bronze medal in the Second “Chinese Fine Art Awards: Creative Awards”. Five of his works were selected for the 12th and 13th National Exhibitions of Fine Arts and three were supported by the China National Arts Fund and China Literature and Art Foundation. Over fifty works of his have been collected by more than twenty art museums and galleries, such as National Art Museum of China, Nanjing Museum, White Rabbit Museum Gallery in Sydney, Australia, and by private collectors from more than ten countries, including China, the United States, Britain, Germany, Italy, New Zealand, Australia, Korea, Switzerland, etc.

Textual Brocade, Zhonghua: 2018

Papers of all issues of Beijing Evening News in 2018, paper-twisting and weaving

567 × 409 cm

2017–2019

 

In ancient China, the silk brocade represented the highest craftsmanship. As recorded in Caibo (literally meaning “explaining dyes and silks”) section in the Eastern Han dictionary, Shiming (literally meaning “the explanation of names”), “Brocade is like gold (both words are pronounced similarly in Chinese as jin). The making of brocade is time-consuming, labor-intensive, and complicated, and its price is compared to that of gold. Hence only the nobility can afford to wear the fabric.” Therefore the manufacture of brocade is of significant cultural value. Wang spent a year twisting the papers of all issues of Beijing Evening News in 2018 into threads and weaving them into patterns, using the techniques of brocade-making. Rather than merely using traditional techniques and visual forms to reflect today’s real life, Wang worked directly with the textual information of the day and ingeniously combined the physical object of newspaper, a printed medium of mass communication, and the logic of brocade weaving so as to formally refine the daily reports of current events. In this sense, the work is a textual brocade that recounts historical and social memory.

 

Cultural China: the Great Han

The English-Chinese Word-Ocean Dictionary, twisting and weaving

183 × 183 cm

2018

 

This work uses The English-Chinese Word-Ocean Dictionary as fabric and recreates traditional garments of the Han dynasty (where the Silk Road, the prototype of today’s Belt and Road Initiative, was established). In this work, histories are told through the texts of today, while the present is informed by the past. “People of today will not meet those of the past, yet the green hills and the roads remain the same.”

 

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