Shiwen Wang (1995) is a London-based artist from China. She is currently finishing her MA in Painting at the Royal College of Art in London (2021). She obtained her BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (2019) and her BA from the Shanghai Institute of Visual Art (2017).
Wang has exhibited her work internationally, with some of her most recent shows at the Hongik Museum of Art in Seoul (2020) and Millennium Gallery in London (2020).
Wang’s work concerns language, particularly the limits of its representation and the vagueness of verbal expression. She explores these linguistic liminal spaces by fleshing out the tension between hiding and revealing. Wang is not simply interested in engaging the viewer in a wild goose-chase for hidden meanings. She aspires to invite them to a semantic game of hide-and-seek, to be played merely for its own sake.
Her delicate application of thin washes of paint allows individual colours to flow into one another with a translucent luminous quality. Yet her use of muted tones in a limited palette of earthy greens, beiges and purples, evokes a more ominous sentiment, namely that of nostalgia. It is a nostalgia for something that cannot be expressed with words.