If you forget your name, please follow me no.4

XIYAO WANG (B. 1992)

If you forget your name, please follow me no. 4

signed in English and Chinese, titled, inscribed and dated 'If you forget your name, please follow me no. 4, 2022 135 x 125 cm Wang Xiyao' (on the reverse)

acrylic and oil stick on canvas

53 1/4 x 49 1/4 inches (135.3 x 125.1 cm)

Painted in 2022.

PROVENANCE:

Luce Gallery, Torino, Italy

Acquired from the above by the present owner

NOTES:

Born in 1992 in Chongqing, China, Xiyao Wang lives and works in Berlin, Germany. An MFA graduate of the Hochschule für Bildende Künste in Hamburg, Wang has quickly emerged as one of the most dynamic voices in contemporary abstraction. Her large-scale gestural canvases unite painting, movement, and performance, each mark embodying a moment of energy and intent. Rooted in the traditions of both Chinese ink painting and Western abstraction, her work transforms gesture into language and creates an expressive choreography of body and mind rendered visible on canvas.

Wang’s practice is deeply concerned with freedom and boundlessness. Preferring large formats, she regards the expansive surface as a stage for rhythm and motion, where lines, dots, and colors can fly or move around the canvas as they wish. Drawing inspiration from sky and landscape, memory and sensation, she creates compositions that feel both spontaneous and meditative. The act of painting, for Wang, is an embodied experience where the canvas presents an infinite and physical space for dialogue between control and release, memory and immediacy. Her work recalls the way traditional Chinese scroll paintings unfold like journeys with landscapes one walks through and are viewed in a film-like way rather than stagnantly. At the same time, her work recalls the expressive lineage of artists such as Cy Twombly and Joan Mitchell.

In If you forget your name, please follow me no. 4, these ideas converge in a vivid, lyrical field of motion. A misty ground of lilac and blue evokes atmosphere and distance, while ribbons and dots of red, orange, yellow, green, blue and purple surge across the canvas like dancing traces of thought. The forms gather and disperse, creating a visual rhythm that feels at once ordered and free, grounded yet airborne. The work evokes a memory of a landscape, as if part dream, reminiscent of the sky, and colorful inner and worldly terrains that bridge her experiences of Europe and China.