The Well-trained Renegade: Profile of Wang Yuping

From one look at a larger-than-life self-portrait in Wang Yuping’s Beijing studio, it’s clear that the artist paints himself older than he actually appears. Though the red glasses and spiky grey stubble are the same, in person, he is youthful and amiable with a quick smile and the same observational, quotidian humor seen in his paintings. But it’s a cliché now to claim that an artist is just concerned with the everyday; Wang’s work serves to record his perception of secular life in a post-authoritarian era. In the 1980s, he studied at the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing, beginning in the ceramics department before transferring to oil painting in 1985. Yet he wasn’t interested in the Socialist Realist teachings of the time, which focused on stiff, rational representations and which retained the official and propagandistic connotations of a fast-receding era of Chinese history. Wang even considered dropping out until a professor encouraged him to stay—a blessing, as the formal training would later prove important to his practice. In 1991, alongside his classmates Yu Hong, Liu Xiaodong, and his wife Shen Ling, Wang would participate in the important “New Generation Art Exhibition” in Beijing. In the same year, he showed at the National Art Museum of China, and in 1997, participated in the 47th Venice Biennale.

• China