Mingyue Wang 王明月

Wang Min Yue’s meditation paintings

By Sandra Miranda Pattin

Spirituality is a word and a world that artists today are more than ever in history interested on, that is if we look at spirituality away from the concepts that might be attached to religion. The search is done through many different ways but all those artists working some how with this orientation have the common belief that art is a space where the spiritual evolution can happen. Art is a mirror, is a free territory where deep connections are made, invisible threads are suddenly visible. David Bohm, the quantum physicist on his book “On Creativity” talks about how the rational thought tends to fragment the information to understand it and study its divisions separately loosing though the connection between all parts as well as the connection between the individual and the environment, whereas creative thought allows to evidence that essential connection between all things and their environment even if they seemed far away from each other. Art is then a territory / connector of the essence of the world. 

Wang Min Yue is a painter that is certainly focused on this matter, he has accomplished through painting a subtle sense of something we could perceive as meditation and/or contemplation. His paintings are figurative portraits that are a result of the encounter between two cultures in terms of painting techniques. On one side one can clearly see the influence of European painting, somewhere in the Flemish painting, even some of the light and shadowing that Vermeer was able to put into his artwork is visible as a trace in Wang’s paintings. Vermeer’s light always coming from the left side could be compared to Wang’s use of light, as well as the saturation of colors, vivid and intense, real but not exacerbated. On the other side one can also perceive the strong presence of Chinese traditional brushstroke and the incredible contemplation capacity that trained Chinese painters have. These two dimensions, opposed geographically and culturally, cohabit in harmony in Wang’s world, what completes this new territory is the conceptual research this artist is doing, a research that goes beyond art frontiers invading as well the personal and intimate sphere. 

By looking quickly at his paintings one could define him as a figurative portrait artist, however his portraits are beyond the simple definition of portrait painting, specially because the intention in his work is not necessarily to portrait a specific individual but to use portrait as a tool for a higher mean. In other words, he is not painting portraits of individuals, he is using subjects in the form of a portrait to help him search for the pure essence that at the end might not have anything to do with the individual in the portrait but all to do with a place where the essence of everyone is connected. 

In some of his works he presents a duplicity, he is stating that one perception or representation of the person, no matter how complex it could be or how close to reality it is, does not tell everything about that individual, also because the individual itself might not know everything about him or herself and what is the information projected to the outside. Backgrounds are built with lots of texture but they are neutral, unidentified places where the individual and it’s alter ego are suspended. 

Wang searches for that present but undefined self of the other, not only using the duplicity element, sometimes he includes a subtle surreal situation. In some of his portraits what strikes the most is the movement of the figures, there is no static pose, they are about to do something, to fall or to stand up, to speak or to dialogue with the spectator, it feels like a slow motion frame, the figures are looking at us, at least one of them in the case of the “Double self” portraits as I like calling them. These works are based on the belief that through art it is possible to see someone in a much deeper way than just the visual appearance, the fact they are moving makes a lot of sense if we think that paintings are a window to other times, a time machine somehow and nothing and no one remains the same. Everything is in constant transformation and when a painting feels like it is moving, one can get the sense of an ongoing process that we were able to look in a specific instant but that a minute later might have changed, leaving us the sensation that the painting is a scene that continues outside the frame, in an invisible dimension.

This duplicity brings also into consideration the basic symbols of Yin and Yang, opposed but necessary for equilibrium, they don’t mean good and bad, they mean light and dark, night and day, cold and hot and so on, they complement each other for one can’t exist without the other, when the Yang is in it’s higher state the Yin inevitable emerges. Wang’s paintings resembling the duplicity of the figure show this complementation, how someone can never be in only one way but must always go through opposite feelings, different mind states and various fluctuations in a life time.

Alex Grey, the painter and spiritual guide that Wang admires, has said something very pertinent to this matter: “The soul of the artist is a psychic antenna tuned with the needs of the soul of the world itself. Art expands the consciousness of the observer, allowing the vision of the content of the hearts and minds of humanity”. Following this thought one can certainly understand why Wang is trying through a portrait to connect with the soul and mind of both the person in the portrait and the observers, creating a common point of dialogue. This also means that Wang is looking for those connectors that will allow him to perceive the other individuals in their deepest essence and thus making him walk through his own essence. It is important however to underline that Wang’s paintings can be perceived as portraits but they are not, certainly not in the very classical way we can think of, they are specific choices of individuals that act as a mean to research other more complex levels of the high states painting can get you in. Apart from those portraits that have been commissioned, his aim is not to wait for someone’s request to have a portrait made, he chooses mostly female figures, sometimes one of them appears in several paintings, each time with a different interpretation, so the woman herself is not really being portrayed as a whole but she is being interpreted in different occasions and spaces in order to create a map of the intersections of time and changes happening constantly within ourselves.

One feels called to enter into the dynamic of these series, that lightness of the figures, that shows them weightless in space make us feel embraced and part of something bigger that actually contains us, timelessness. These paintings have the capacity of involving you in several levels of observation and perception: in the appreciation of the technique, in an intellectual level with their symbols that speak of the person but also of a higher context, in an emotional level with their duplicity, allowing us to question our own definition of the self and individuality, in a purely artistic level with the encounter of two cultures in such a subtle and equilibrated way where no predominance is really allowed.

This brings me to something I have often expressed to artists when discussing what is it that an artwork should have to be a good artwork, and leaving aside for now the obvious technical and esthetic terms, I like making a comparison with Charlie Chaplin films, let me precise though that I’m not relating Wang’s work with these movies. I affirm that people can relate to these movies in so many different ways from the simple entertainment to the higher critical and conceptual statement that he made, meaning that even though you could have little knowledge of the vast internal conceptual work of an artist you can still connect to the work in your own way and from your own level. I believe with Wang’s painting one can relate regardless the level of understanding someone has of art, painting, Chinese philosophy, European classical painting, spirituality or other specific matters that interest the author. 

Almost all of the portraits beside those that have been commissioned to him, are female figures dressed in the traditional Chinese clothing, objects that are symbols of Chinese culture appear constantly, this is a common symbology in Wang’s work, it seems a way for him to underline his own cultural baggage and the one from these women even though they probably don’t dress like that everyday or ever. This brings back the theory of Le Coq’s neutral mask, a piece of cloth you wear on your face, he stated that by wearing a mask with no characterization, your true self would emerge other than your face since the cloth would eventually be shaped by your factions. These clothing might have the same function, it makes a clear statement and allows us to go beyond the message that actual clothing gives of someone, opening a different reading of the true self, making it collective and not individual.

One could ask what could be the reason to paint portraits today, in the past this was a way to leave a documentation of people, now with photography being so immediate, portrait painting has less functionality, I believe one has to redefine the meaning of portrait. On dictionaries it is stated that a portrait is an artistic representation of someone where the face is predominant, with the intention to display likeness, personality or mood. Looking at Wang’s paintings we are able to have more than that likeness as an ultimate aim, in the case of the commissioned portraits, he goes beyond the representation of the physicality of the person, he explores a higher level of the individual, it is the connection the artist establishes with the subject that flourishes. In the other works we can definitively get rid of the definition of portrait painting, he is not researching portrait nor figurative painting, he is observing female models to research not them specifically but to research through them a specific matter. Ultimately his painting is like a meditation.

When the portraits are less interpretative and that means portraits that have been commissioned, he still gives them movement and his research is still very present, he places that subtle gesture that builds the whole identity of the person, that tells you far more than the personification of the physical resemblance.

One example is the portrait of former UK Prime Minister Sir Edward Heath, it is an atypical painting among those political portraits that aim to show the virtuosity of the politician in order to keep him or her eternally alive. This portrait speaks of an attentive man, staring at something where he is prepared to intervene if necessary, in fact his gesture tells us that he is sitting but ready to stand up in a second if that matter he is looking at needs his intervention. Again, there is no static identity, for sure a physical resemblance but maybe more a personality likeness, he is not posing, he is active, it certainly shows the strength of this man but his attentiveness and great care for diplomacy. Another important commission is the portrait of former Prime Minister of Thailand Ms Yingluck Shinawatra, in this case she is an classical pose but Wang decided to use first all the Chinese traditional painting techniques and second he decided not to give much relevance to her clothing but only brought intensely forward her eyes and smile, through this simple action he elevated her most important characteristics - if you think she was the first female prime minister and the youngest in 60 years of Thailand-. It speaks of her internal knowledge and specific strength and not of the power she certainly had, cleaning the information that might be given by a formal clothing painted in detail, or symbols of power that could have certainly been included, he made a portrait of the human being and not the politician. It is also a way of keeping painting truth to itself without taking positions regarding the people that are portrayed.

Painting is an activity that requires training and talent, it is also a state of mind, it elevates the painter into a deeper introspection, into a higher spiritual level, painters like Kandinsky, Rothko, Pollock have understood this and researched it both rationally and emotionally, aware that it would transform not only themselves but also the spectators. Wang is a follower of the Lao Tzu's teachings and one of the most inter