Xin Wang, “Grotto of Life in the Frozen” (2023) (all images courtesy the artist)

BEIJING, China — I first visited Xin Wang’s studio in July 2023 and have returned to it at least once a year since then. During my first trip, we discussed what I would call her Proustian moment, which occurred when she returned to her hometown of Guilin, a city in southern China just across the border from Vietnam, to care for her seriously ill father. For nearly a year, immersed in a dramatic landscape of limestone karst (soluble stone that produces grottos), famous cone-like mountains, and winding rivers and lakes, Wang watched as her father’s illness progressed. At the same time, she recalled the ghost stories and fairytales she had heard and games she played while growing up. One game she told me about was called “Re-attach.” It consisted of:

Assembling the head of a cicada that fell from a summer tree with the body of a grasshopper, or combining the dissolving and decaying animal bodies in wild grass with mineral stones. I freely swap all the “heads” within my sight, combining seemingly unrelated materials: animal legs, biological humans, plants, fingers, cavities, houses, spiral green dots — dissolving the barriers between the abstract and figural, spectral and physical.

This inescapable cycle of decay and regeneration came to define the path her art would take. What I saw in my first visits both surprised and intrigued me — it was unlike any other art I had seen in China, particularly in its evocation of orgiastic desire. Wang’s pastel drawings in radioactive green and phosphorescent white — colors that are often associated with contamination and rebirth — on a black ground evoke a bacchanalian world. Her imagery included skulls, dancing women, frenzied worshippers, goddesses, and lovers who wished to exist outside of law and propriety, to live carnally on the edge of chaos.

Xin Wang, “Head of a Female Warrior” (2025)

Wang’s vision is simultaneously utopian and anarchic, erotic and dissipating, blooming with life and haunted. But more than any of these binaries, it is threatening, as it challenges viewers to think differently about both mortality and morality, and the desire to live outside the established rules of decorum. In these works, collectively titled Jungle, she conveys a dreamlike domain of wild growth and extreme weather, which echoes her childhood in Guilin. Essentially wild and unchecked, this series shares something with Dante’s Divine Comedy, William Blake’s The Marriage of Hell and Heaven, science fiction, and the libertine imagination, but from a feminine perspective. Goddesses inhabit her world rather than gods. In this realm, she seems to traverse both the body’s interior cavities and interstellar space, connecting the two. Her spirals of green dots are both cells and stars, invoking Carl Sagan’s well-known observation: “The cosmos is within us. We are made of star-stuff. We are a way for the universe to know itself.”

In 2024, I curated Wang’s solo exhibition, In the Dark Grotto, at the Karlovy Vary Museum in the Czech Republic. In my catalog essay, I focused on her marriage of pastel’s powdery materiality with the work’s disquieting imagery. Its resistance to being encapsulated by language is one of its primary strengths. It is difficult to satisfactorily define what we are looking at.

Xin Wang, “Study for Reluctant Lover” (2025)

During my most recent visit to Wang’s studio, this past May, I saw a copy of Javier Regueiro’s guidebook, Ayahuasca: Soul Medicine of the Amazon Jungle (2017), on her bookshelf. I also learned that in 2015, she had participated in an ayahuasca ceremony in Iquitos, Peru. This confirmed something that I had suspected since my first visit to her studio: She is a visionary artist who has synthesized personal and family experience, childhood memories, consciousness of mortality, and lasciviousness into a dark, unfettered, hallucinatory world.

In an email exchange from October, Wang wrote:

Around 2023, my process was still about enlarging my drawings into film negatives and merging them with oil painting through a single-layer silkscreen. But by 2025, something fundamental shifted — I began working larger and painting directly on the film, and, like Matisse, cutting and assembling fragments of images as if performing a ritual that calls a new species into being. These new forms intersect with the images and symbols I had previously created — like letters in an alphabet — and continue to grow on the surface. I keep layering oil paint or mineral pigments on canvas, allowing the forms to continue evolving and transforming. I often wonder who or what is projecting this information. There are moments when everything suddenly aligns, and the image arrives with power, as if invited, as if I am the shaman, both priestess and priest.

Xin Wang, “Ping-pong girl” (2025)

The child who once played “Re-attach” had transformed herself into a shaman capable of transporting the viewer into the fantastical world she inhabits — one that is constantly in flux.

During my nearly daily visits to Wang’s studio during my two weeks in Beijing, as she was creating work for her exhibition Sons Warriors Lovers at ShanghART in Shanghai (November 11–December 27), I watched her work on a drawing, transfer it to a silkscreen, rework and enlarge the image, and alter it some more. I could never tell what she was going to do next. One piece composed of several sheets of film and paper seemed to portray two figures merging into one. In another, she began with a disturbing drawing of a nude, featureless figure, in a back bend position supported by their arms and legs. Between their legs we can see what could be a caged penis or a strap-on sex toy. A spoked circular contraption lying in front of the figure contributes another layer of mystery. Over the next few days, she kept adding and subtracting, modifying and enlarging this figure, while making other pieces. She transferred the image to a silkscreen; a few days late, it floated in a black cloud of cosmic dust, like a new asterism.

Wang is an artist of grand human ambition. She envisions the cosmos within her materials, lead and ink, and seeks to see beyond the stars.

John Yau is an award winning poet, critic, curator, and publisher of Black Square Editions. He has published over 50 books of poetry, fiction, and art criticism. More by John Yau