KIKI XUEBING WANG (1993) is a London-based artist born in Zhengzhou, China. She obtained an MA in Painting from the Royal College of Art in 2020 and a BA in Fine Art from the University of California, Los Angeles (2016).
Wang has exhibited internationally, with her most recent show at Linseed Gallery in Shanghai (2020). She has also been nominated for the John Moores Painting Prize (2020), among other awards.
Inspired by advertisements of luxury objects, Wang sees guilty pleasure as the driving force for the depiction of what she is longing for, and as a way to explore the eerie effect of 21st-century consumerism. Her paintings are characterised by the exploration of the modern desire for luxury fashion and a playful way of scaling, which presents selected objects like handbags, watches and garments in intimate close-ups, resulting in an “in-your-face” manner of viewing.
Wang’s compositions are bathed in non-traditional lighting depicted through saturated colours applied in thin washes of paint, inspired by Dario Argento’s horror films. In a time of economic uncertainty brought on by the Covid-19 pandemic, blending frightful elements with images of expensive fashion, Wang allows us to reflect on our own guilty pleasures and desires and the possibility of transformation between non-valuable and luxury.