Suling Wang (b. 1963) was born in Taichung’s Qingshui. She received her BA Fine Arts from the Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design, London in 1997, and an MA Painting from the Royal College of Art, London in 1999, after which she founded a studio in London. Since 2018, she has frequently traveled between Taiwan and the UK. She was the 2019 Artist x Artist Gala Honoree of the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden; and in 2023, she became the first Taiwanese artist to ever receive the Medal of Arts awarded by U.S. Department of State’s Office of Art in Embassies (AIE).

A Dialogue between the East and the West to Achieve the Inner Balance

As a student in the foreign land, Wang embraced the traditional Eastern cultural learning from her background growing up. Her identity as an Asian studying in the foreign city of London led to her inner conflicts. Thus, she tried to navigate the geographical and psychological distance between the East and West, and found her inner balance through painting. Known for her large abstract paintings, Wang’s work is predominantly charactered by fluid brushstrokes and lines, which are the results of her maneuver of rich sensibility, informed by the wrinkling texture in contemporary Eastern painting as well as her nostalgic memory of her hometown. Through stratifying and layering paint, she is able to create a “complex space,” and uses vision to lead and unify fragmented elements into a spatial-temporal whole.

Having lived in London for two decades, Wang has frequently traveled between Taiwan and the UK in recent years. Her painting series, The Singing River and Mountain Language, profoundly reflect her care for and how she resonates with her hometown. Growing up by Dajia River, The Singing River series symbolizes her sentiments for this mother river in her life and the subtle “flow” between the space and time of Taiwan and the UK. The Mountain Language series is inspired by the  poignantly dramatic tension of interpersonal relations depicted in the one-act play, Mountain Language, which she watched , in 2001, with her husband, the English artist, Daniel Pulman. After viewing the play, Wang promised herself that she would one day create her own “mountain language.” Wang started the Mountain Painting series in 2019. To her, “mountain” reminds her of the environment which she grew up in, and embodies the images of her parents. Wang’s father worked in the forestry industry, and lived in Kaohsiung’s Maolin District, known for spotted butterflies. Consequently, “butterfly” has become a symbol for Wang to convey her remembrance for family. The “dots” in her paintings, on the other hand, represent her unfathomable emotional bond with her mother, whose passing in 2002 was devastating to the artist. For several times, her tears were uncontrollable during painting, and the tear drops formed various tiny dots on the canvas, which have not only become her painting vocabulary, but have also stored her innermost memory of her parents.

Different from the “visuality” emphasized in Western landscape painting, the landscape in Wang’s work is profoundly influenced by her physical and cultural environment growing up, and thereby displays unique Eastern perceptibility and reserved expression of feelings and emotions. Her painting is a reconstructive process to reassemble the broken self in the imaginative space. The image of her painting is the integration of the East and the West, and is both abstract and realistic. In a delicate and superb manner, she inscribes the stories of life to explore the river basin and language of “home,” through which has encountered her most authentic self in her quest.

Wang has extensively exhibited in prestigious art museums worldwide, among which are the National Gallery (London, UK), the Museum of Fine Arts (Houston, USA), and the National Gallery of Victoria (Australia). Her works have been included in the collections of renowned institutions, including the U.S. Department of State; the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum (New York, USA); the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (USA); the Utah Museum of Fine Art (Salt Lake City, USA); the Cincinnati Art Museum (USA); the UBS Art Collection (Switzerland); and the London Stock Exchange (UK), which attests to her remarkable achievement in the international art scene.