SHANGHAI.- Loners - Wang Dawei’s solo exhibition is the first show FQ Projects presents in the year 2017.This exhibition showcases Dawei’s newest 15 oil paintings and some works on paper he created since he went to stay in the States in 2015.

“People” have always been the main focus in Dawei’s works. He has painted the restlessness, void and depression of urban life, as well as the desire, anger and ignorance of urban dwellers. Observing life and people in life from a third person’s perspective has been the artist’s way of finding and collecting materials. After moving to the USA, his unfamiliarity in language made him going further in inner observing and experiencing. The loner identity pulled him away from real life, let him fully become an outsider in a foreign country.

For example in this new body of work, there are two safeguards relaxing themselves, eating ice-cream cones during a short break in Two Securities No.2; there is a man smoking by himself outside a busy bar in Nightclub. Dawei calls these scenes caught in a flash “momentary reality”. And it is the touch he feels in these brief and careless revealing moments the feeling of reality he has needed all the time.

Dawei records life by painting and he is good at using a wide range of materials from canvas to paper, oil to ink. Most works of this exhibition include the use of collage, reflecting his continuous exploration and mature application of various materials. Compared with former works, his narrativity trait can be seen more obviously: Lines of constructions, as if stretched by wide-angle lens; geometric shapes, appearing repeatedly; images cut by large color hunks. The figures among those lines, shapes and images, with their vague facial expressions, look petty but real, like every lonely self.

Wang Dawei, born in 1984 in Shanghai. Graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts at Shanghai Normal University in 2009. He has been involved in Shanghai Normal University’s invisible gallery graduation exhibition, the Degas Art Space Art Exhibition, FQ Projects New Generation Art Group Exhibition, Shanghai Museum of Contemporary Art “In Between Reality and Fiction” Animamix Biennale, FQ Projects Monologue Group Exhibition, FQ Projects “The People Around Us” solo show, dual solo show of “Shanghai jing, Shan hai jing”, group exhibition of The Avant Garde Diaries Project Space in New York, as well as the Shanghai International Contemporary Art Fair and Art Stage Singapore.