By Virginia Campbell
Chinese-born Sacramento artist Jian Wang speaks an imperfect but highly effective English and is given to saying direct, often entertaining things like: “In art I believe quantity is as important as quality.” Because Wang backs up that statement with such examples as Picasso, who, he points out, left behind in his own studio some 60,000 pieces of work in addition to everything already in other hands, the statement is not overtly radical. But it runs counter to the way most people think about art. After all, we are not talking about “product” here, inasmuch as an artist does not “produce,” but rather “creates.” Notions of the quantity or the variety of an artist’s oeuvre seem slightly irrelevant and/or inappropriate. Not to Wang, however. The “work” part in the phrase “works of art” is essential to him. “I’ve worked so hard,” he says, “I’ve developed carpal tunnel syndrome.”
Closely allied to the importance of quantity and quality of work in Wang’s view is versatility. “If I only thought of sales,” he explains, “I might specialize. But I believe in the artist as a Renaissance man, a total package. If you look at history, capable artists can do any subject. Sargent, Degas—they could do figures, still life, landscape. Degas did bronze sculpture, and even though his critics had a horrible time with them, he kept doing them.” Wang himself does bronze sculpture, too, perhaps specifically because Degas did. But the variety of his two-dimensional work alone—in genre, medium, and scale—is notable enough. And the truth is that the energy level suggested by the sheer quantity and versatility of Wang’s work is visible in each individual piece, and is, in fact, the very key to its character and quality.
“The process of painting, the power of making, is what interests me,” Wang comments. “I like the aggressiveness of making things, the struggle. When I begin to get too comfortable in one medium, I switch to another. I’m not comfortable till I’m uncomfortable. When I pick subjects, I don’t need to worry about the subject overcoming the process itself.”
This zest for the creative fray has served Wang well, not just in his artistic career but in his life as a whole. All artists lead unusual lives by definition, but even by the odd standards of artistic life Wang’s biography is extraordinary. He was born in 1958, on the cusp of the Cultural Revolution, in China’s Dalian, a cataclysmically historic northeastern city surpassed in Westernization only by Shanghai and Hong Kong. For the latter part of the 19th century and the first half of the 20th it was occupied by foreign powers, first Russia and then, even more brutally, imperial Japan.
The turning point in Wang’s life came when he met Marjorie Francisco, a retired American art teacher who was teaching college in Dalian. She became his mentor in a dramatic, almost novelistic way, streamlining and bankrolling his travel to her home city of Sacramento, CA, giving him a place to live, paying his tuition at a local college, and being his supportive friend. “I always hope she’ll say she did this because she thought I was so talented,” Wang laughs, “but she never says that. She just says she liked me.”
Maybe so, but Francisco was an astute judge of talent and character nonetheless. For a young man who’d done well under China’s communist system, Wang had powerful dreams of living a life of individualistic creative enterprise like his heroes, Michelangelo and Rodin. Leaving his close family and security behind in 1986, Wang ran with the opportunity. After a year in the United States, he was able to bring his wife and baby daughter over and build on his efforts, eventually moving on to the University of California at Davis, where he studied closely with first-rate American artists like Wayne Thiebaud. He went on to get a master’s degree from California State University at Sacramento in 1994.
“I found an artist like de Kooning quite wonderful,” Wang recalls. “He had a profound understanding of tradition. I studied cubism, abstraction, constructionism. I could appreciate these modes as part of history, but gradually I found I didn’t have the belief that I was doing something other than just painting a fashionable style. Painting this way was not in my blood. The image gives me the sense of concrete accomplishment. Without the image, I don’t have the sense that I’ve done my work profoundly. The first-generation abstractionists went through the struggle, but in the second generation there’s no spiritual heightening, and fraud comes from not going through the struggle.”
Wang’s artistic struggles have allowed him to support his family for a dozen years now. He has made a true home in Sacramento, the place Marjorie Francisco led him to, where he lives and works in a large home just a block from the American River, which is the subject of many of his landscapes. His work is collected fervently in Sacramento—somewhere between 300 and 400 different people own paintings by him, and several own many of them—though he also has followings in various unlikely outposts around the United States, like Memphis.
At 46, Wang is now by some definitions in mid-career. Yet this career follows another, quite different one that he pursued in another, quite different place. He probably enjoys a greater excitement in some ways than most mid-career painters who were born in America and painted professionally all along. His methods reflect confidence gained from taking risks along his path in life and art, an unspoiled survival instinct born in the cultural crossroads of Dalian, and a self-reliance that is, in terms of the modern art world, quaintly Emersonian. Whether he is painting still lifes or figures in his studio, which he tends to do in the summer when the Sacramento landscape suffers from what he calls “sameness,” or working en plein air, he uses large brushes that tell the tale of the painting process, avoids a palette in favor of squeezing his paint directly into boxes attached to his easel, and never mixes his oils with paint thinner, which, he maintains, “dilutes the intensity and flattens the brush strokes and lessens the accountability of the painter.” He sticks to six or eight colors at any given time, none of them being black because it interrupts the transitions from warm to cool that interest him.
In his still lifes Wang prefers to present himself with formal problems. For example, he likes to paint eggs and always paints one of them with the pointed end toward the viewer so that the shape on the canvas is perfectly round and ever in danger of “looking like a Ping-Pong ball.” His newest still lifes deal more overtly with concepts and veer into surrealism. In a series of paintings of toys, the objects cast shadows that are not the shadows of the objects themselves but of what a child’s imagination might make of the objects. In a painting called THE THREE GRACES, three gawky toys in primary hues cast a unified, animated abstraction on the wall in pale but vivid blue.
Wang is represented by Art Expressions Gallery, San Diego, CA; Solomon Dubnick Gallery, Sacramento, CA; Richard MacDonald Gallery, Carmel and Laguna Beach, CA; and Lisa Kurts Gallery, Memphis, TN.
Featured in February 2005
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