(Shanghai, China 1991)
Wang Yi’s artistic practice originates from painting and expands through a variety of media, including sculpture, installation, text, and collage, using symbolic forms, colors, and materials as carriers to explore the broader potential of abstraction beyond questions of style. The artist believes that all social phenomena, past, present, and future, can be expressed through elementary geometric forms, and summarizes his creative philosophy as “Grand Geometry.”
As a member of China’s new generation of abstract artists, Wang Yi regards abstraction as a vessel for ideas: phenomena and thought ultimately manifest in distinct forms that respond to issues of nature and the city, historical culture, and social structure. He conceals his responses to reality within abstract surfaces, allowing them to converse with China’s unique cultural context and to generate new layers of meaning through that encounter.
Wang Yi has won or been nominated for several awards, including Porsche 2020-2021 Young Chinese Artist Biennial Prize (2021), Tomorrow Sculpture Award’ (2021), John Moores Painting Prize (2016), Luo Zhongli Scholarship (2016), and Creative M50 Creative Prize’(2012).
He lives and works in Shanghai.