Artist: Wang Pei

Workplace presents Sertraline, a new body of paintings by Wang Pei that explore how emotion and identity are shaped under pressure.

Borrowing its title from a widely prescribed antidepressant, the exhibition reflects on what happens when feelings are named, managed, and standardised. Rather than directly referring to medicine, the works ask how we experience emotion in a world where it is increasingly regulated.

Many of the paintings depict figures turned away from the viewer: the nape of a neck above a cotton collar, a back receding into a dark ground, shoulders contained within the sheen of a silk dress. With expression withheld, attention shifts to posture, micro-gestures, and to surfaces that mediate between the interior and exterior. Here clothing carries a psychic weight; surfaces held together, pressed smooth and hinting at tension beneath, which is constantly withheld.

When faces do appear, they are fragmented or unstable. La chair depicts an extreme closeup with two eyes at different distances and angles, the same face caught as if in two moments simultaneously, lips barely parted. Identity is not presented as fixed, but as something that shifts across time, like a sequence of cinematic cuts. The image refuses resolution, it is poised at the threshold of speech before withdrawing, leaving a residual tension that persists beyond viewing.

The material qualities of paint play a central role in this body of work. Thick and thin layers, scraping, and overpainting register pressure, resistance, and release. Through these processes, emotional states are translated into physical form, inviting a more embodied way of looking. Certain areas read like skin compelled to remain composed; others carry agitation that cannot be fully smoothed away.

The paintings are organised though a logic akin to cinematic editing. Space is unstable, and time non-linear. Textures and postures reoccur across the works like mnemonic echoes, with each presentation quietly redefined by minute differences. Within these cuts and intervals, solitude emerges not as the absence of others, but as the insistence on remaining answerable to one’s own perception amid external noise and inherited grammars.

At a time when numbness becomes the path of least resistance, Sertraline insists on the importance of feeling. Through attention to surface, material, and pause, the paintings invite viewers to reconnect with the complexity and weight of emotion.