Yeqiang Wang
Reflections
September 5–October 4, 2003

Originally from Beijing, where he was trained in the state-approved, academic school of painting, Yeqiang made the long trek to Canada (both physically and psychologically) to attend the Graduate Program of the University of Windsor’s School of Visual Arts. In the short time since Yeqiang Wang has lived here, he has developed a unique pictorial style that combines an exquisite, traditional painting technique with an outsider’s view of an often incomprehensible new world. As a diaspora (as he names himself), Wang depicts a fragmented impression of the new culture he was suddenly immersed in, and “slams it against the closed cultural circle” of his traditional Chinese background. With a particular fascination with reflective surfaces-windows, doors, mirrors, blinds and glass (which the artist wishes to function as “portals of perception”) Yeqiang creates site-specific, hyper-realistic paintings that merge with and mimic the physical spaces they occupy, deviating only slightly from reality.