ARTISTS

Jian (Wang Jianxiao), born in Suzhou, China, is a seasoned Chinese artist with over four decades of experience. Jian is a graduate of the Central Academy of Arts & Design (now the Academy of Arts & Design, Tsinghua University) where she majored in lacquer painting. After graduation, she studied lacquer art in Japan for 3 years between 1993 and 1995. From 2003 to 2018, she moved to live abroad in the US and founded Jian Art Studio. The States is also the place where contemporary and abstract traits in Jian’s works emerge. Her works are thus a reflection of her experience of cultural collision and integration between the East and the West.

Jian’s works have been showcased in international art exhibitions in China, South Korea, Japan, the United States, Taiwan, etc. with collectors all over the world.

In her recent works, palette knife became a crucial tool and the carrier of inspiration, of the unique textures formed by repeated strokes and blocks of colours, which in turn show a strong sense of rhythm and movement. Though Jian’s artistic style appears to be abstract, she takes inspiration from ancient Chinese poetry and incorporates in her works figurative elements such as floral shapes and bird patterns that appeared in her dreams, fantasies, or fragments of life. It is essentially a reinterpretation of elements of flowers, water, and clouds in traditional Chinese poetry.

The alternation and overlap between various texture in Jian’s works will surely evoke viewers’ sensation of synesthesia and stir one’s soul, as if an unbridled symphony envisioning a resplendent and kaleidoscopic world with colour as notes and texture as rhythm.