Xuning Wang calls himself a ‘realist painter’, this means he confronts his audience with a series of dramatic paintings. Drawing on his Chinese and Australian lifeworld experiences, he paints images in a ‘realistic’ style, contrasting the rising water levels of the Chinese Yangtze River with the arid landscape of a Western Australian farm, juxtaposing a Chinese refugee with the happy posings of Yangtze River cruise tourists, or comparing the ‘conveyor belts’ of department stores with a scholarly person deep in thought.
Xuning is guided by the idea that now is the time to rebuild the relationship between art, everyday life and the humanities, to re-establish that innate connection between art form and cultural discourse. His way of achieving this is to revive the realist function of art, to understand ‘the truth’ in the realities that surround our everyday lives.
Written By Jane Donlin