You find yourself in a hot room, the air filled with steam, obscuring everything - or everyone - around you. You can no longer rely on your eyes to make sense of reality, your ears can only hear muffled sounds, the only smell your nose can detect is that of moisture. Now you feel two unfamiliar hands touching your skin. You try to turn around and see who is touching you, but the mist hides their bodies. They are shy at first, then they become more daring, caressing your shoulders, your nipples, your hips and then reaching even lower, at your genitals. Now you stop bothering to look, you accept your eyes' futility, you even forget that you were ever able to see at all. And the two hands become four. Then six. Eight. Ten. Countless.
When sight is out of the game, the fusion of perception and imagination leads to less explored rims of reality. Sex is just one example, but a perfect one when it comes to Wang Haiyang's work. Born in Shandong in 1984, his paintings feel like inner visions from outer worlds, and vice versa. But it would be simplistic to relegate these works to the realm of surrealism and psychoanalysis; rather, they inhabit the (very realistic) tension between desire and darkness, between eroticism and fear. Painter, then animation video director for ten years, then painter again: since his studies at CAFA - Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing, Wang Haiyang has been merging disciplines, just as his painted bodies merge with one another.
So, we were talking about sex. Wang's paintings are full of sexuality, sometimes quite explicit, and you can't go wrong in saying so: the two naked figures in Boundary (2024), as well as the phallic plants and flowers in Seed (2023) can prove it. One can't go wrong either in pointing out the impressive technique behind every single hair of his characters, as well as his ability to convey the sensations of viscosity, softness, and texture. And yet, both sexuality and technique are specific to the surface of his paintings. They are masterful eye-catchers, designed to seduce us like a mermaid's song. From predator, the viewer (or voyeur) becomes prey. You can't help but keep looking, both fascinated and disturbed. In a constant dialogue between ancient polarities, Wang Haiyang illustrates - with apollonian accuracy - alien worlds, enchanted forests, and Lynchian rooms where the only law in force is dictated by Dionysus. The god, depicted in the act of being born from the hairy thigh of a masked Zeus (Dionysus' Birth, 2020), suggests not only the influence of Western mythology on Wang Haiyang's work, but also his interest in constructing an iconography of fluidity in the broadest sense, both of gender and of species. If the painting California Lover (2021) beautifully depicts a contactless but thrilling tension between the animal, the human, and the botanical, works such as Forbidden Love (2022) and Void (2024) show us how eroticism can be condensed in the touch between two bodies of unknown but different species. And when it comes to watercolours of the Human Beast Ghost series, this fluidity of the subjects leaks into a metapictorial dimension, becoming fluidity of the technique itself. His latest solo show at Capsule Shanghai's Venetian venue (Love Dart, 2024, curated by Manuela Lietti) was a great chance to appreciate how easily Wang Haiyang shifts from one technique to another, always showing respect for the epistemologies of each.
But again, we find ourselves lingering on the surface, as if we were scared to go deeper and discover the monstrous nature of the mermaid: we would soon come to realize that what we find uncanny about Wang Haiyang's works is not what they portray, but our masochistic and undeniable attraction to the uncanny itself. This finding is both liberating and frightening, at least as much as an encounter with strangers in a promiscuous sauna, like the one we imagined at the beginning: the suggestion comes from Wang Haiyang himself, who recalls a gay sauna in Berlin where the intertwining between fear and excitement was extremely clear to him, if not in words or thoughts, surely in his body and its feelings. In the years that followed, the artist tried several times to find that place again, without any success. To the extent that today he questions its very existence, as well as the reality of his experience, without ever doubting its legitimacy. We can even understand this as a foundational myth of Wang Haiyang's imaginary. Perhaps, that sauna was a different frequency of our reality, just like - I believe - his paintings are. They are not mere windows onto other worlds, but manifestations of the twisted and ineffable complexities of terror and desire, inscribed in our world, in our society, in our existence as individuals and pluralities at once. Through them, we discover ourselves to be oblivious to the thresholds of our bodies and identities, as well as incredibly aroused by the countless possibilities that such oblivion unveils.
© L'Essenziale Studio
