Xiao Wang is a Chinese-born painter based in New York, and his art perfectly captures the feeling of being trapped between two words. His moody oil paintings offer a perfect balance between nature and humans, bliss and pain, and he’s using them to voice his perspective as a Chinese immigrant.
Xiao Wang is a classically trained painter, who studied at the Glasgow School of Art in Scotland before getting his master’s degree from the San Francisco Art Institute. In addition to sharing his work online, he also exhibited it all across Europe and the United States over the years.
His oil paintings mix together many different styles, drawing inspiration from romanticism, symbolism, expressionism, and magical realism. As for the subjects he explores in his work, he enjoys tapping into the personal and collective psyche in the current moment of chaos.
Natural references are often present in his work, but they’re just means to an end and he’s using them to capture the feeling of being stuck between two worlds as an immigrant in a foreign country.
“Wang’s work captures feelings of uncertainty and anxiety using uneasy figures, distorted colors, and uncanny landscape elements, they draw attention to the mental burdens brought on by many of the issues of the contemporary,” he explains on his official website.
