Wang Xiaoqu

Leopard, 2020, oil on canvas, 130 × 130 cm

Wang Xiaoqu employs humor and exaggerated effects to capture various everyday events and images on canvas. Her paintings are influenced by the aesthetics of comics, yet she enhances the materiality and realism of her works through brushwork and the manipulation of light and shadow, creating a tension between fiction and verisimilitude. While she deliberately attempts to establish a “thematic” figure, she simultaneously deconstructs these forms through conflicting brushstrokes, rendering them like models stripped of their original expressive intent. Through the subject of portraiture, she conveys her understanding of the inherently contradictory nature of painting as a medium.