ANTWERP.- GNYP Gallery will present the exhibition Bedtime Stories by Kaifan Wang. It is the fourth solo exhibition by the artist, the second one in the Antwerp branch of the gallery that was founded in Berlin.

Kaifan Wang (°1996, Hohhot, Inner Mongolia) grew up the region of the Gobi Desert, from an early age exposed to different cultures. Trained in calligraphy and familiar with traditional Chinese landscape painting, he kept on expanding his artistic and geographic horizon, moving from Beijing and Shanghai to Florence and Berlin, a city he has called home for the past ten years. This nomadic lifestyle also translated to the different influences he integrated in his pictorial practice, in line with a rich history of cross-cultural exchange between artists from the East and the West embracing the abstract idiom, often with a strong gestural dimension. But unlike some of the die-hard modernists he admires, banning every sense of narrative or outer painterly reference, Wang’s memories of his place of birth – probably triggered by the geographical distance – daily observations and socio-political events trickle down in a sublimated manner in his multi-layered compositions. He also often adds references to the region where he is exhibiting his work by means of a central theme, motive, or dominant colour scheme. Earlier, he made a series in blue, referring to Delft blue pottery, the result of Chinese-Dutch trade relations; gold, as a reference to the goldrush in California which attracted a high amount of Chinese fortune seekers for an exhibition in Los Angeles; or yellow, evoking the Gobi Desert from his childhood.

For his exhibition at GNYP in Antwerp, Wang continues mainly in the yellow colour scheme, as he evokes a sense of home, both as a physical and mental place. Bedtime Stories refers to childhood memories, to peaceful naps in the afternoon with his grandparents’ family who were continuing the pioneering work of Belgian missionaries in the expansion of Catholicism in Hohhot in the 19th, early 20th century. Instrumental was the use of religious iconography, which Wang discovered at an early age by means of copies of Western paintings hanging in the church his forefathers helped to build. Besides Catholicism’s visual language, with all its symbols and tropes, there were also rituals and gestures that were passed on. For the paintings Melted Halo and Grace comes Down (all works 2025), evoking dynamic cloud-like compositions with hues of yellow and gold dripping down, Wang re-enacted the ritual of the priest blessing him as a little boy by forming a cross with his thumb on his forehead, a gesture the artist, almost twenty-five years later, repeats on canvas, to reinforce his already varied arsenal of techniques, including, amongst others, smearing layers of paint with a sponge and using oil stick as a form of mark-making.

There are also several, stripped- down references to artists from the Low Countries, amongst others Melchior d’Hondecoeter’s Dead Rooster (17th century) and Pieter Breugel the Elder’s The Fall of the Rebel Angels (1562) - both works on view at the Royal Museum of Fine Arts in Brussels. As with his other painterly references, one does not have to detect the allusions to enjoy Wang’s stylistic brilliance. In self-confident gestures, he strips down the inner structure of both paintings to their essentials, reducing the original composition to a dynamic game of lines and colour, an exercise he repeats throughout several versions of the same painting in an ongoing attempt to capture its essence. That is especially the case with d’Hondecoeter’s Dead Rooster, a work he keeps on getting back to. When he saw the painting for the first time in Brussels, it reminded him of Jesus hanging on the cross, an image we in the West are so attuned – or even immune - to, that we no longer realize its visual strength and violence. In his first version, appropriately called Studying Dead Rooster: Posture, Wang has depicted the rooster upside down to alter the energy flow, as he was intrigued by the contrast of the bodily fragility and spiritual detachment of the original painting.

That change of perspective, the upside-down rendering, is also echoed in Clouds fell on Scorched Field, an impressive painting Wang specially made for the architecture of the gallery. To admire the work, one must look up at the ceiling - or down in a mirror reflecting the ceiling painting. Like Morning Mist, Buried Beneath the Meadow and other work mentioned earlier, it is a landscape from his childhood, rendered in almost epical proportions, as a Battle between Angels, a huge clash, turbulent movement or wave of energy he manages to evoke so well by means of a technique he had developed over the years. Because of the work’s immense size (260 by 520 cm), Wang had to change his usual gestural apparatus, attaching sponges to the end of long poles, swinging them from a distance to rub against the canvas—an approach partly inspired by but adapted from Matisse’s late painting method. The result of this technique is that there is no longer one single, dominant perspective, which was not only important from a technical point of view but also a conceptual one, in line with the cross-cultural pollination his work bears witness to in the most outstanding way.

Sam Steverlynck