Wang Yifan and His Three Models

Star Gallery is going to present Wang Yifan’s one man show Wang Yifan and His Three Models from 15 August to 11 September 2020. The exhibition will include more than 10 oil paintings recently created in the past dozen months.

Wang Yifan’s focus of art has been switched to the painting of portraits since 2015, whose subjects started from the artist’s relatives and friends. His three key models— Wu Xiaoke, Jeff and the artist himself — are “the three models” in the title of this exhibition, who are constantly and repeatedly seen in Wang’s paintings.

The way an artist treats his or her models varies in different contexts of art. To Wang Yifan, the fundamental use of a model is the objective shape of “it”. Not limited to the appearances, however, the shape will extend to the complicated personalities and emotions of the sitter as a real person. Before he starts, Wang Yifan will always give specific instructions to his models like a theatre director, making sure the exact pose and facial expression that he expects to see is fully explained. Nevertheless, his models are usually unaware of the situations and settings that they will be put into. The painting of portraits that Wang Yifan is devoted to sits on the border of fiction and nonfiction, where he has continued to weave people around him, together with himself, into one and other act of his opera.

More often than not, other models besides the three will appear in Wang Yifan’s paintings, such as “Mr. Xie (Xie Molin) and Guangle (Wang Guangle), who are also my friends. Maybe there will be some others, but I am not sure.”