Artist: Fanseng Wang

Perrotin Shanghai presents “New World,” a solo exhibition for Chinese artist Fanseng Wang , marking his first collaboration with the gallery. The exhibition surveys Wang’s painting practice from 2008 to the present, foregrounding his sustained inquiry into Post-Orientalism and modes of non-iconic existence. From early reconfigurations of Chinese landscape painting through lush reimagining and subtle pastiche, to later works that turn toward invented forms and historical references, he methodically forges connections between the profane and the sacred. His canvases stage a convergence of nature, the human condition, and metaphysical space, articulating an artistic doctrine defined by composure and capaciousness.

Beyond serving as an invaluable archive of imagination, Wang’s work reads as a philosophical treatise on the structure of the world. Beginning with the landscape series “Records of Qixie Mountains,” the artist seeks to revive a landscape lineage that predates literati codification. In the “Zhiguai” series, abundant forms, fantastical allegories, and eccentric symbolism produce a disquieting richness. In early Chinese historiography, the anomalous is not opposed to truth, and zhiguai, or the accounts of the strange, are granted historical legitimacy. Such a cosmology—one that imagines the world as an indivisible totality—finds precedent in the pre-Qin Classic of Mountains and Seas, where deities, creatures, and terrains coalesce into a unified supernatural continuum. The mystical and the topographical together structure the world: geography is grasped through zhiguai, and it in turn provides the matrix through which the world is conceived.

Since 2020, Wang’s ongoing series “New World” consolidates landscape, geography, human presence, and mythic beings into a cohesive whole, rendered in luminous, unadulterated color and suffused with sensual delight. Everything thrives; creatures, however strange, revel in their existence and the joy of life. “New World” evokes a primordial condition, intrinsic and prior to all division.

Among the works, Giant in the Wilderness alludes to the Buddhist notion of “Mount Sumeru contained within a mustard seed.” The towering figure set against the open field oscillates between human form and sacral architecture, resembling a pagoda or shrine. It projects a form of sanctity severed from utility and narration, verging on a semantic void. Wang’s textural strokes advance through calibrated contingency; up close, one encounters a proliferation of tiny figures. The giants thus dissolve into rock formations, transforming in strata and deflecting attention away from material form toward a single insight— that all phenomena are but illusion. Several worlds interlock in the composition: the wilderness depicted inside the small triangular form, the surface of the world, and the giant’s territory together open onto another stratum of reality. In this almost four-dimensional space, time is suspended, and the rectangle of the frame constitutes a closed, self- sufficient world. Taking the giant as its point of departure, Wang pushes painting to an extreme of scale in his own practice. And the exhibition brings together the most expansive group of works he has produced thus far.

The following essay was commissioned from Wang Min’an for this exhibition.

A Labyrinth of No Exit:
On Fanseng Wang’s Pictorial Practice

1. Fanseng Wang’s chromatically radiant canvases teem with uncanny forms. Each eludes definition. Some resemble artifacts, yet betray no discernible function; others suggest animals, yet remain without motion; some evoke the human body, yet bear no human face; others recall deities stripped of divine power, or specters devoid of menace. They occupy a liminal space between objecthood, animality, humanity, and the divinity. Just so, they hover at the threshold of life and death, at once animate beings and inert matter. Wang further compounds this ambiguity by stacking them in dense profusion, allowing these motifs to multiply and overlap, thereby heightening their illegibility. The forms strain against settling into any determinate image. And what emerges is a mode of quasi-figuration. They qualify as images because they are not mere exercises in abstract form; rather, they seem driven toward figural resolution. Yet the form they arrive at is one we have never encountered, untethered to the real and marked by the strange. Wang might be said to create, on canvases, an iconography of the strange uniquely his own.

2. How, then, does this iconography of the strange take shape? Several strategies are at work. It begins with heterogeneity: a seemingly complete image is compelled to generate difference from within, undoing its given integrity. Wang renders the image metamorphic, so that one form perpetually evolves into another. A mushroom-shaped torso gives rise to the outline of stone; the stone sprouts a bud; the bud yields clustered, crouching figures; the tiny figures in turn become vessels. Images suggestive of limbs likewise remain in flux—a bent leg, an outstretched palm, a contorted face—each proliferates in excess, merging with inorganic elements to generate enigmatic amalgams.

Such heterogeneity produces another condition—a seamless nesting and linkage. Each form passes into another: an ending becomes a beginning; a concavity accommodates a protrusion; folds contain folds while being contained themselves. The dominance of curves sustains this recursive logic of embedding and enclosure. These linkages fold each small, partial shape into an encompassing totality. No rupture, no break, no fissure separates one motif from another; they form a seamless continuum. The whole and its parts engage in an unceasing play of embedding, without beginning or end, entry or exit.

Beyond proliferation and embedding, certain images intersect and splice with brute insistence. Crowded to excess, they level and negate depth, forcing the entire field toward the surface. Interior and exterior collapse, along with any residual depth. The result is a dense and overgrown flatness. Paradoxically, flattening intensifies corporeality. Each form emerges with palpable volume and heft—spheres, cones, cylinders compete for visibility, only to engulf, exhaust, and eclipse one another amid the density.

3. Heterogeneity, recursion, and planar accumulation lend Wang’s paintings the semblance of a labyrinth. The composition offers neither start nor finish, neither axis nor periphery. Hierarchy gives way, and with it any fixed center; the gaze wanders restlessly across the surface. Attend to a single detail, and the eye is at once pulled toward another. The image neither fosters concentration nor induces aimless drift; it leaves the viewer at a loss. One moves here as though trapped in a corridor without exit: behind one door stands another, beyond one breached wall rises the next. No ground is reached, no terminus, no conclusion. No center presides over the field, no clear perspective structures it, no discernible path charts its space. The forms float upon the canvas, neither anchored elevated, held in suspension. This is painting as the construction of a labyrinth.

The disorientation is not merely spatial but temporal. Within Wang's paintings, time forfeits its vector; it ceases to unfold linearly and turns back upon itself through recursion. Its trajectory mirrors the labyrinth it inhabits, turning, bending, looping, and crossing without end. Time proceeds in stasis, revolving through transformation. Circulation governs not only space and time but the imagery itself. Shared forms, recurring patterns and geometries, familiar curves and lines, even similar configurations resurface in various parts of the composition and across separate works. Yet repetition does not replicate; it transforms.

4. Heterogeneity reiterates itself through color. Wang’s paintings are distinguished by their rich and saturated palette. Varied chromatic intensities cling to distinct motifs and flare across the surface, establishing a dynamic tension between color and form. The motifs themselves remain neutral, their pathways undone by incessant mutation. Color, however, grants them voice. It does not merely fill in form; its brilliance can dominate the surface, even subduing the shapes beneath its intensity. The pictorial field radiates with an exuberant vibrancy: baby blue, pale gold, soft lavender, and muted green flash and reverberate against one another. Each image relies on their glow to step forward from the visual thicket. Still, another shimmer answers it, challenging and tempering its radiance. The painting therefore becomes a site of chromatic contention. Color builds toward incandescence, flickering with instability, until the image becomes as labyrinthine in hue as in space and time.

At times, these bright, saturated hues stand in sharp contrast to the motifs they envelop: cryptic rock formations are coated in creamy pink, and misshapen limbs are swathed in syrupy yellow. Such disparity propels the folding and unfolding of the pictorial creases, engendering a peculiar visual effect—the mountainous forms do not verge on horror, but on the strange. Here, color does not so much replicate the truth of reality as conjure a sense of unreality. It heightens the strange, disassembles the real, and ultimately ushers the image toward illusion.

5. What, then, is at stake in such a labyrinth of metamorphosis and illusion? In its geometric articulation, the work nods to Cézanne. Concrete forms are abstracted into cylindrical, conical, and elliptical units, an analytic deconstruction of figuration. Pictorially, a Surrealist shadow lingers. It reveals the implausible lodged within reality, the genesis of dream and delirium, the surfacing of a latent unconscious. The imagery at times conveys spectral unease, a ferocious deformation, and even a teeming vitality—impulses resonant with Expressionism. In this sense, the modernist legacy continues to inform Wang's practice.

6. Nevertheless, Wang’s practice is anchored in a direction uniquely his own. These paintings of pure surface, of infinite linkage, of colors vying for presence, what are we to make of them? Is this simply formalism at play? Through Deleuze, the dynamic becomes legible: endless becoming, no center, no depth, no transcendence—only chromatic illusion, surface, linkage, and flow—an image of thought.

Yet for all its Deleuzian resonance, the conceptual impetus here may derive more fully from Buddhism. The paintings suggest an affinity between Buddhism and Deleuze rarely examined. For Deleuze, there is no Cartesian subject. What endures is perpetual becoming, of which the subject is only a transient configuration. His thought bears an unexpected kinship to the Buddhist refusal of attachment. And the Buddhist idea of dependent origination and emptiness anticipates his philosophy of becoming.

And so, the provisional replaces the eternal; process dislodges conclusion; change subverts stasis; contingency overrides necessity. In Wang’s work, these reversals erode any claim to a sovereign subject— whether that of the image itself or of the viewer who confronts it. Like a labyrinth without a guiding path, the composition disperses authority across the surface. Space is leveled, forms coexist without hierarchy, and distinctions lose their weight. All phenomena remain ephemeral. What unsettles the image unsettles the viewer as well. No vantage point is available. Perception operates as a fluctuating interplay of sensation, feeling, impulse, and consciousness.

7. Buddhist thought and Deleuze both dismantle the premise of a stable self and the illusion of permanence. For Deleuze, affect and desire disperse the self; in Buddhism, the five skandhas reveal the “I” as a brief composite of bodily and spiritual phenomena. Yet their aims diverge. Deleuze’s destruction of the subject is an act of liberation—of desire, of difference, of becoming—calling forth a life animated by creative force. Buddhist thought carries the dissolution of the self toward stillness: nirvana, the cessation of the afflictions and karmic forces born of self- attachment, and a passage beyond the cycle of rebirth toward release and repose.

8. Do Wang’s images give rise to rapturous delight, or to repose that follows release? For Wang himself, it is likely the latter; for others, it may well be the former.

About the artist

Wang Fanseng (formerly known as Wang Tianxuan) was born in Dalian, Liaoning Province, in 1984. He graduated from the Oil Painting Department of the Luxun Academy of Fine Arts with a Bachelor of Arts in 2008. He currently lives and works in Beijing.

Wang Fanseng’s artistic practice consistently engages with discussions on “Post-Orientalism” and “Non-iconic Existence.” His work has evolved from his early period—where he juxtaposed nature with human and faunal imagery to manifest a world of fluid boundaries and a syncretic worldview—to his current phase of infusing a “void” world with myriad sentient beings. Vanseng’s iconographic reflection draws primarily from the Buddhist precept that “all worldly phenomena are empty” (Sunyata). In his practice, he bridges two forms of skepticism: the Western painterly critique of the image and the Buddhist philosophical critique of “form” (Laksana). The numerous “imaginary” figures he creates serve as a rebellion against simulated reality. In his own words: “I deconstruct and fragment stale, conventional figurations in hopes that ‘form’ itself may attain Nirvana and rebirth.”

The ambitious “New World” series not only synthesizes the themes and achievements of his previous oeuvre but also delves deep into the conceptual context of art history. The influence of Analytical Cubism and Francis Bacon’s psychological portraiture is palpable in this series. Through “the organic growth of brushstrokes in a state of conscious void,” geometric forms undergo a natural restructuring on the canvas, evolving into vital, living abstractions. He maintains a delicate equilibrium between randomness and control—presenting a visual language that appears disordered but inherently harbors a Cézannian spatial order. Ultimately, through architectural composition and vibrant palettes, he reveals the order and chaos of a multidimensional universe. Within the secular world, Fanseng has willfully established a “Pure Land” of innocence, dreaming a dream of the world and manifesting the myriad forms of existence into imagery.