“Out of Nothing and Nowhere” features an “abstract” art series of Wang Zhongjie’s signature style. He started making “abstract” art with schemata of a kind over a decade ago, and has persisted in it to this day. The exhibition is a summary of this period of his art practice.

The modifier “abstract” is just an expedient to tell this period of Wang’s art from his previous “representational” stage. It’s simply a description on the form of his painting. For Wang Zhongjie, however, he has no intention of exploring painting in form. Painting to him is what enables him to think and discover something, and a form of the boundless consciousness when it takes shape in reality; it’s related to the state of his personal existence. To pursue the initial truth of the conscious for the existence of painting and of himself, he embarked on an extremely rigorous practice of his own: it’s a new path for him towards “abstraction”, which requires the invention of a great amount of time and practice in a new area with infinite possibilities.

The theme of the exhibition, “Out of Nothing and Nowhere”, implies what motivated Wang’s turn towards “abstraction”: to overthrow all shackles and presets and negate established understanding and experience of painting. The “abstract” exhibits from the past decade, the witnesses of Wang’s persistent exploration in a new area, reflect how he gradually approaches the reality and truth of his soul by opening a channel towards the boundless consciousness through the size, brushwork, materiality and texture of painting.

There are both remarkable similarities and subtle differences among all these paintings. As curator Yang Tiange puts it, despite the nuanced ways of expression, still as one sitting in meditation or dynamic as lively Buddhist discussion, they, ultimately, all focus on the seemingly hollow yet complicatedly layered blank in the middle of the canvas, just like leading to the source of the conscious, where one can find enormous obscurity as well as infinite inspiration.