Wang Dongling

Acquired by the present owner directly from the artist

Hangzhou, private real estate development, Fable: Contemporary Chinese Art Exhibition, 2005

There are scattered areas of retouching in the spots where there is light craquelure and mostly concentrated on the left canvas but also on the other canvases also. There is some soiling along the extreme edges. Otherwise, there are no apparent condition problems with this work. The work is framed and was not examined out of frame nor under UV light.
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Wang Dongling's large-scale, boldly expressive ink paintings radiate energy, their drips and spatters exploding across the canvas with abandon.  With a vivid, vigorous command of the ink painting vocabulary, Wang's work nevertheless suggests affection for New York School abstraction.  Here, however, it is difficult to pinpoint the influence of one culture upon another:  on the one hand, Wang's grand statements remain wedded to the language of his native tradition; on the other, earlier paintings by Franz Kline and others to which Wang seems to pay homage (at least in the eyes of Western viewers) may stem from their own fascination with the calligraphic tradition and Eastern aesthetic sensibilities.

The ornate, even baroque vocabulary of Wang's calligraphic art encompasses many kinds of effects and seems to reach for an idiom of transcendence.  In Xuan Wu (Three Panels) (2005, Lot 41) mighty columns and seemingly unrestrained splashes of black expand in epic proportions over the three panels of Wang's triptych, which together evidence a pronounced level of compositional control on such a grand scale.  As a direct recording of the artist's sensibilities, the trio gives form to Wang's desire to expand the long tradition of abstraction within the history of Chinese ink painting itself, not least by pushing its physical parameters.  Yet it also reflects the cosmopolitanism on a man who has taught in America and Japan and traveled widely throughout Europe.  Wang's breadth of culture centers him in a fast-paced practice that is primarily intuitive but in which connections are made between traditions and cultures.  Regardless their sources and appreciative nods, perhaps each work of abstraction should be judged on the merits it embodies, and in Wang's straightforwardly titled Xuan Wu, those merits are powerfully in evidence.

- Jonathan Goodman