Yan Wang

Yan Wang is a visual artist from Beijing, China. With her BFA in Printmaking acquired from Maryland Institute College of Art, Wang has not only covered a wide range of printmaking techniques in her works, but she has expanded her creative practices to mediums like animation and ceramics. Yan Wang has participated in many curated exhibitions, in galleries based in New York, Baltimore, Gulfport, and other cities, as well as many remote exhibitions during the past 2 years. Her animated work The Girls, made entirely from physical prints, is selected to be screened in animation festivals like Sweaty Eyeballs Animation Festival, and is selected as the winner in the category of experimental animation in International Cosmopolitan Film Festival Tokyo in 2023.

For the series of works presented to Contemporary Art Chronicle Volume 6, Yan Wang explores a recent artistic experiment. She dedicated two immersive months to working with a rich palette of homemade ceramic glazes in Jingdezhen, a town that steeped in the tradition of ceramics and chinaware. Yan Wang's focus was on creating paintings on porcelain tiles fired at high temperatures (1280-1300 degrees Celsius), a process typically associated with only this region's gas kilns.

This series of paintings represents Wang's ongoing conversation with glazes and fire. She views every craft as a dialogue with materials, striving to understand their chemistry and visual elements to achieve a harmonious artistic result. In her images, the unique textures of the glazes merge to reflect thoughts on the artist's transient lifestyle and evolving relationship with her surroundings. These musings are visualized in domestic and intimate objects situated in unconventional settings.

Through her glaze paintings, Yan Wang invites the audiences to partake in this poetic exchange, where the mundane becomes transcendent, and the viewer is beckoned to discover the profound beauty within the nuances of material and form.