Hive Center for Contemporary Art is honored to announce the latest solo exhibition of Wang He, Roam of Infinite Vision, on view from 4 November to 16 December 2023 at Hive Beijing’s main gallery hall. This marks Wang He’s first solo show at Hive Beijing, which focuses on his most important works from the artist’s practice for the past five years and his most recent painting adventures. This exhibition is curated by Yu Fei.

Wang He has always been recognised for his exceptional profile. Working at the Palace Museum, he embraces the dual identity of both a duplicator of antique paintings and calligraphy and a contemporary artist. In his everyday life, Wang He confronts the pivotal challenge of reconciling the ‘ancient’ and ‘contemporary’. Collisions and interactions between various times and spaces comprise the structure of his practice, in which series of works with different emphases emerge and flourish like branches and leaves. Classics and traditions have never been regarded as encumbrances or inhibitions but instead have become precious assets for the artist to constantly explore and acquire. He emulates the sense of antiquity with his delicate brushwork techniques without being fixated on returning to the ancients. What Wang He truly values is to fully mobilise the unprecedented high-dimensional comprehension of the depth of space-time in the current context, and to construct multiple worlds that are all-embracing with the subtle and refined language of painting.

This exhibition marks the tenth anniversary of Wang He’s personal practice. The title of the exhibition, Roam of Infinite Vision, intends to summarise the core of Wang’s practice over the years: to initiate an insightful consciousness with the utmost vision, to connect micro and macro realities, and to transcend the time and space between the ancient and the contemporary; and to manoeuvre the cruising and shifting perspectives with a playful attitude, introducing new viewing possibilities into the static images with a dynamic momentum. Wang creates windows of different forms in his work, where he then adds unexpected horizons. Time and space, as a pictorial relationship, are threaded through the gaze; thus, we have a scene within a scene, a painting within a painting, and a world where illusion and truth are inseparable. At last, Wang He sees with his physical eyes, observes with his instrumental eyes, and contemplates with his spiritual eyes, until his complete and self-contained view of painting, time and space, and the world has come into being.

This exhibition attempts to present a garden of time and space viewed in miniature. Alongside the paths that twist and turn, situated high to low, there scatters an array of independent and coherent worlds of painting created by Wang He. Spatially connected throughout, the exhibition space is composed of a closed space-time and a looped and entwined line of sight that extends out from the panels of the paintings. Inside and outside, near and far, nature and technology, reality and illusion, these relationships, both opposites and unities, are encapsulated in the space of his paintings. Wandering through Wang He’s garden of painting, the utmost vision and infinite thoughts can thus be unleashed.