Who invented painting? We may never know, but Wang You found her own way to it - fashioning a childhood hobby into a career as a professional painter. Wang You wasn’t an artist by training - going off-piste from the constructs of the profession but nonetheless painted relentlessly with the same attitude as Van Gogh who expressed, “I never cease to paint, because I paint in order to learn.” She too learns and creates as she paints. Unconfined by rules and conventions of academia, her work glows with freedom, boldness, and passion. She faces an empty canvas without fear and, in fact, sees it as her own built parallel universe - an intuitive space where she lets her imagination dribble away and mold an unrefined feeling. In Wang You’s own words - painting is her paradise.

The notion of “worldview” can be derived from the word “playground”. Wang You abandons the historical burden of the traditions of painting as a medium, nor does she weigh herself with political anxieties arising from issues surrounding cultural identity. From her lens, she views painting as animate, as an extension of life that transcends different ages and civilisations; allowing artists to genuinely respond to their symbiosis with the world. Wang You once shared some of her favourite artists who realmed far and wide in an interview: from early Renaissance fresco artists Benozzo Gozzoli and Paolo Uccelle, to murals from Dunhuang and those from Chinese funerary practices, then back to Delacroix, Manet, Van Gogh, Picasso, before naming Bruegel, El Greco, Shi Tao, Wang Xizhi, and on to contemporaries such as Peter Doig and Alice Neel. The apparent juxtaposition in time and geography in this chaos of a list was perhaps a result of spontaneous conversation, but is ultimately resolved if we place ourselves in the eyes of the painter. Wang You doesn’t see the History of Art or the histories of the civilisations as linear but rather traverses across and wanders in their domains in her own journey of exploration. 

She pauses at Cézanne. Wang You finds herself in awe, struck with reverence as she notes at the impossibility of surpassing Cézanne’s work. She observes how her personality differs from Cézanne’s rationality, inadvertently assessing her sense of “self” and her character as she talks about painting. Wang You seemingly enjoys crafting her personal image, calling to mind the genre of “self-portraiture” -  a cornerstone of painting. Though, as we position ourselves in today’s media-driven age, a spectacle perpetually generating faces in the facial society Thomas Macho speaks of, our obsession, if not thirst, of the image compels us to surrender private ownership of one’s face to the public domain. Alternatively, the “propagation of facial identities” is catalysing the frightening erosion of human personality, with the graphic image of the self increasingly becoming plastic and rendered to being a mere symbol. Though, what even is the “self”? Descartes, however “rational”, did not recognize that there would be an inherent relationship between one’s face and expression of the self. He claims “I had a face”, which was part of “the whole structure of bodily parts that corpses also have - I call it the body”. In this way, parallels could be drawn to the process of a painter’s “self-portraiture” as the conscious host is inevitably objectified - a mask. 

Is the body really of little significance? Only the living can grasp its magnificence. Akin to Descartes’ divisibility of the body, the body of the living is engaged in the constant enquiry into its own existence. The phenomenological distinction between “being a body” and “having a body” is a reflection of the inherent tension found in the human condition of the observed objective body against the experienced subjective body.  “The ego is first and foremost a bodily ego; it is not merely a surface entity, but is itself the projection of a surface.” Sigmund Freud understood the self to be composed of external and internal dimensions with the body mediating the tension between external inputs and one’s internal desires. As we reflect on Wang You’s sense of “self” she translates onto her paintings, we notice that she rarely focuses on “self-portraiture” as the literal act of merely depicting facial appearance; they are instead amalgamated representations that contemplate body posture, gestures and semantic contexts. As for her faces, rather than being markers of self-identity, they are more accurately displays of the body’s agency.  

For Wang You, painting is a physical act, much like dance that she has an intimate relationship with. Movement in both practices informs one’s sensibility of their own energy flows. Despite differences in medium and the respective spatial dimensions, they both demand the same rigour of self-discipline and self-fulfillment required to refine technique which culminates in realizing one’s potential. In Wang You’s endeavours to implement this regime to her artistic practice, she first deployed a style which she describes as paintings that “felt like sketches”. Colourful linear brushstrokes gave forms an outline, while functioning to organize space on the picture plane. At times, she left swathes of white or featured occasional colour blocks in the background. These works came across as improvised collages both in terms of their composition or how they were perceived. Wang You soon came to realise that this gap between her sense of spontaneity, her intuition and her imagination was the way in which her body afforded her the opportunity to create. 

Change Life for Free (2021) is a work in which Wang You recontextualizes the image of the “mermaid,” displacing it from the literary realm and situating it within her constructed reality as a representation of a psychological archetype. In doing so, Wang You’s paintings evolve in gaining clarity on her perception of painting - specifically in her case,  “theatricality”. The canvas becomes her stage as Wang You’s experiences in the arts converge, not just in painting but all encompassing, in expressive forms that involve the body from dance, to theatre or that of film; continually responsive and fermenting to fuel the expansion of her painterly world. In Wang You’s paintings surrounding “love”, we witness how “love” is defined through life events: a chance encounter invariably ending with separation (The Lost Years)；or facets of our memory resurfacing only to be replaced by new memories and lost forever that the decomposing fish by the shores seemingly represents (Too Much Has Been Forgotten). Wang You captures universal experiences. The body is the locus with her focus shifting from the artist towards the viewer. 

In the same way, the viewer’s gaze converges with those of the painted figures in the “Where Your Gaze Touches” series. The “Droste Effect” is not merely a trompe l’oeil of sorts, but an attempt to transcend dimensions in extending the visual plane as an immersive viewer experience similar to the concept of breaking the fourth wall in contemporary theatre. That said, Wang You is keenly aware of the boundaries of painting as we return to the paintings themselves. In other words, the dichotomies such as that of hallucination and the real or that of the imagination and reality too, mediate boundaries. Wang You’s visual language evolves with these shifting states. In The Castle (2024) series, Wang You incorporates sculptural and representational elements to depict complex interpersonal relationships across four successive scenes within a polyptych. There goes a saying, “there are a thousand Hamlets in the eyes of a thousand people”. Wang You’s The Castle is similar to the Kafka novel of the same name, in the ways that they, and every work of literary or visual art, are open to interpretation by their audience. Nonetheless, we remain eager to quench our thirst for the knowledge of “what does Wang You really want to communicate”? Perhaps it is her painter’s anxiety. Or is it her underlying desires and ambitions, or even an attempt to immortalize “painting” that reigns supreme over that of talent and power. 

Ostensibly, we can view this as the artist’s “daydream”. Artists like Wang You often themselves immersed in their own worlds, working in isolation within their studios - fortresses of their own making. In Lectures on Aesthetics, Hegel discusses the role of the artist and the human spirit. He suggests that through observation, contemplation, and the expression of one’s emotions and circumstances, the human spirit becomes truly self-determined. For such a spirit, nothing that can become vivid in the human heart remains foreign. As such, Wang You extracts the famous line from Camus’s The Stranger, “Because of the sun”, not just as a commentary on the absurdity of the human world, but as an expression of how art is the source of her radiance - because it is only in this way that she can illuminate others as we inhabit her paradise that she has so generously shared with us. 

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