Wang Haiyang at Capsule Venice

Capsule Venice is delighted to present to the public its summer programme featuring “Love Dart”, the solo exhibition of the work of Wang Haiyang.

Occupying the upper floor of the main space, as well as the entire annexed gallery, “Love Dart” presents the most recent body of works by the Chinese artist Wang Haiyang (b. 1984 Shandong; lives and works in Beijing). The new works are paired with a selection of the artist’s most iconic video works and earlier paintings, thus providing the most complete survey of Wang’s work to date. Working in painting and in animation, Wang Haiyang’s practice challenges the viewer with its novel and constantly-evolving visual and conceptual tensions, through which the familiar and the uncanny overlap, opening new territories of existential possibility and alterity.

The title of the exhibition pays homage to the sharp, calcareous or chitinous darts which some hermaphroditic land snails and slugs create and shoot at each other during their mating process. Despite their still unclear functions, love darts are scientifically recognised as a tool for increasing reproductive success, having possibly evolved as a result of conflict over the fate of donated sperm, or as a way to select the most fit sperm donor. In previous decades, love darts were thought to be used to persuade the prospective mate. Although these past explanations have proven to be erroneous, they still hold a certain fascination for Wang, along with the idea that the connection of darts to copulation is already inscribed in the expression “love dart”, evoking the arrows of Cupid/Eros. In this exhibition, Wang unfolds conceptual nuances such lacunae in knowledge imply, highlighting the simultaneous presence of attraction and repulsion, desire and danger, love and hate, life and death, excitement and fear, the interplay of controlling and being controlled.

Explored across a new series of watercolors, acrylics on canvas, as well as earlier pieces lent from private collections for the occasion, and animations, Wang’s poetics refer to the continuous metamorphic process that relate the individual to the primal forces of life, death, lust, desire, and sex. Deploying a sophisticated, multi-layered painterly language, often bearing autobiographical dimensions, Wang reveals what lies in the hidden recesses of the human mind, its impulses and submerged forces. His paintings, although devoid of overt narrative features, are often imbued with cinematic atmospheres and suspended between reality and dream; they are set against the backdrop of lost garden of Eden, but also serve as a premonition for a future one, portraying the transient moment in which a specific feeling, desire, or compulsion erupts into being, the moment before becoming arrives at being, capturing the intensity that “an arch uses to prepare to shoot an arrow”. This approach lends the works a profound subtlety and allusiveness.

Wang’s pieces are stills of potentiality temporarily frozen in time before being crystallised into an “after”. In this process the artist activates and indulges in a chain of voyeurist gestures involving the audience – watching and imagining what has happened before and what will happen next in the work – and the artist himself – triggering, watching, and imagining what will happen in the mind of the viewers after they leave the exhibition and the work lives on in their minds.

Wang’s paintings are renowned not only for their intricate compositions, rich textures, and sophisticated balance of alluring colors and geometries. It is also impossible not to notice the precision of his touch in representing in works such as Blue Dream, Red Midsummer Night (2023) naturalistic imagery of pearls, or, in Seed (2023) and What a Caterpillar Calls the End of the World We Call a Butterfly (2022), the dense yet liquid veins of the protagonist’s body, or hair in the “Skins” series (2017 – 2020) and the recent Boundary (2024). Other elements as well are born out of his rich imagination, though they bear less direct reference to real life. Although Wang works out from sketches, his images evolve in a spontaneous way, each individual brush stroke leads to the next. But the core of Wang’s practice lies far beyond creating aesthetically pleasing or comforting art. The works of “Love Dart” never compromise simply to please the eye, but rather challenge parameters of what is known and considered acceptable, putting aside the paradigms of stigma and shame, reflecting on how something or someone can act as object of desire and simultaneously be abject. A vivid example of these aspects of Wang’s practice are the works Mother (2021) and Dionysus’s Birth (2020), both of which are characterised by bringing to the surface, in an almost circular way, the processes of life and death, and innocence and guilt by means of a direct and brutal visual syntax.

The light, extemporaneous nature of Wang’s watercolours in his ongoing series, “Human Beast Ghost” (2019-) reveals the delicate side of Wang’s painting. These works are an ode to the flow of energy uniting the human and animal realms. In this cosmic dance, the subconscious of the painter shapes compositions in which the cyclic nature and interconnectedness of all beings is portrayed through a phantasmagoria of shapes and creatures, in a chain of musings touching upon personal, societal, mythological, and philosophical dimensions. If seen from afar, what first appear as stains of pure colour on closer viewing reveal the incessant flow of life, and the interconnection of both constructive and destructive forces.

Text by Manuela Lietti