Kaifan Wang

There is a story mentioned in the writings of Pliny the Elder describing an incident in the studio of the famous painter Protogones about 4 BC. Working on the portrait of hunter Ialysos, Protogones painted foam coming from the mouth of a dog, but was not happy with result since the foam didn’t look natural. Angry, he threw a sponge against the painting’s surface, the sponge landed on the dog’s mouth and, voilà, the perfect foam was born.1 This action that was later termed a ‘deliberate accident’ formed an important aspect of art theory in the 18th century, in which apparent effortlessness was opposed to painstaking exactness in depicting reality.2 While I will not focus here on formal methods for depicting reality, the idea of the sponge involved in the ‘deliberate accident’ with artistic consequences fits perfectly well within Kaifan Wang’s own sponge story.

I first met Wang at the Universität der Künste (UdK) Berlin during his graduation show in summer 2022, the twilight period of the Covid-19 pandemic. During this strange, hopefully once-in-our-lifetime experience Wang’s ideas about formal and conceptual qualities of his work were taking shape, both purposefully and accidentally. When the pandemic broke out, several of Wang’s cohabitants hastily left Berlin fearing that they would otherwise never be able to return to China. Wang stayed, which signals his willingness to take risks and his ability to handle loneliness for the price of independency. One day, surrounded by their abandoned, useless mattresses, Wang slashed one open and started to cut its spongy foam into small pieces (“kaputt machen” is Wang’s favorite subversive approach in German postwar art). These little pieces invited him to paint again – as a UdK student he was mostly exploring other mediums before – and became, from that moment on, his main painting tool. Now, Wang also uses dishwashing sponges for his work. Consequently, this move to sponge led to a transition into painting. A deliberate accident indeed!

Sponge is a material that can absorb fluid, and can be squeezed to become dry all over again. It is a thing that is able to change volume very easily, to become big, wet and heavy, then almost weightless again. Under pressure, it takes another shape only to return to its core form once the pressure has gone. Wang loves the texture of sponges and the effect that they produce: “When they are full of water, they are soft and flow like painting with ink, and when they are dry, they can express the strength.”3 The permanent ability of absorption and change symbolized by this tool is the basic idea with which to understand Kaifan Wang as artist.

Many artists have used a sponge in their art production throughout the ages. In the 17th century it was applied for rendering specific parts of a painting, such as moss, which possesses a structure similar to the sponge.4 Later on, sporadic examples of sponge usage can be found in the works of artists such as Joan Miró, Yves Klein or, more recently, Adam McEwen with his Sponge Paintings (2014), which incorporated layered sponges printed with photographic images of New York City—not to mention the sponge technique for painting the walls of a room, for which instructions are readily available online.

Wang uses sponge as a device for mark-making in his abstract paintings. Its irregular internal structure soaked with paint forms a thin layer of grainy smudges on the canvas, and oHers glimpses into other layers of colors shining underneath, creating a sense of depth. What is interesting in this process is the proximity of the hand that holds the sponge to the canvas, which shortens the distance between the artist and the work normally defined by the brush. In this way, the mark-making implies a closer involvement by the artist that perhaps more directly translates his ideas and his own artistic handwriting onto the canvas.

This closeness between the artist and the work is also achieved by Wang’s other main material of choice, the oil stick. Similarly to the sponge, the oil stick entered Wang’s artistic practice in a deliberately accidental way: painting at home during lockdown, Wang was trying to find a paint with less odor and discovered the oil stick. Surprisingly, it offered more than just a practical solution to the smell—it enabled him to ‘handwrite’ on the canvas, causing what Wang calls “fluid sensation”. Pen control and wrist strength were skills that Wang gained during his calligraphy education in China. Mind you, although Wang’s subjectivity always hovers in his works, his sponge marks and his oil stick handwriting don’t suggest intimacy but rather implicate his presence in the work.

Wang was born in 1996 in Hohhot, which, despite its population of 2 million, is considered a provincial city in China, and which the artist associates mostly with sandstorms, bugs, and his allergic reaction to these natural phenomena. Hohhot, however, is the place where it all began, as it was there that the 6-year-old Kaifan began taking lessons in calligraphy and Chinese traditional painting, his first encounter with an established artistic expression. I’m not the right person to write about calligraphy, so my only intention in mentioning it is that calligraphy sparked interest in art, which resulted in a chain reaction of changes that brought Wang to Berlin.

Exposed to Chinese and Mongolian cultures, as well as to Buddhist, Hare Krishna and Catholic influences from the outset of his life, Wang was accustomed to absorbing various, sometimes conflicting standpoints simultaneously, which created a breeding ground for him as an artist with an intercultural perspective. Later, it might have helped him reconciliate diHerent artistic traditions that he has followed: rebellion against, versus respect for, tradition, and intuitive decisions in his practice combined with intentionally deployed pictorial effects.

The key concept in Wang’s artistic attitude is the will to know. Given Wang’s age, his hunger for knowledge and understanding of the world could seem typical for this stage of his life, but I would suggest that there is more to it than just young person’s curiosity. Wang behaves, in my opinion, according to the German Bildungsideal, a concept developed in the 19th century presupposing that knowledge of art and sciences will make you a better human and independent spirit, and that by educating others you contribute to social progress. His continuous longing for accumulation of knowledge goes hand in hand with a sense of mission, as he sees art as a “weapon and channel” to change society and himself. From this perspective, the slashing of matrasses was more an act of scientific curiosity about what was inside than an act of destruction—while Wang’s solo exhibitions can be regarded almost as a research method about a specific subject, on which he focuses on a given moment.

Every exhibition investigates another subject, be it Mongolian landscape, Dutch-Chinese relations in the golden age or the history of Chinese goldminers in California in the 19th century. Paintings resulting from these investigations express Wang’s reflections, ideas, and veiled introspections about his own position in the world (Wang’s paintings are autobiographical for those who make eHorts to read them, to paraphrase Lee Krasner5). Working in the non-representational territory, Wang has decided to let colors carry specific meanings related to the subject he explores so he lends each solo show a specific subject-related color palette. Subsequently, for his exhibition about the Dutch-Chinese cultural and economic exchange he gave blue and brown the central role since these were the dominant colors of the Dutch design used for producing porcelain in China in the 17th and 18th centuries, while for the exhibition of goldminers the main character is the subtle gold. In an unusual way, Wang uses abstraction for storytelling.

An important story for Wang to tell is his immigrant existence, which taught him to manage fantasies, expectations, limitations, and hard work. Like many immigrants, Wang has close ties to home, but home is made up of, and situated between, memories, experiences, and existing geographical places. He imagined, on his first plane trip to Berlin, that after landing he would take a long, deep breath of clean air. There was a popular joke in China commenting on Beijing’s smog about a Beijinger who came to Germany and fainted, drunk on oxygen, but in the last moment managed to rush to the bottom of a bus to inhale some exhaust fumes.

Berlin turned out to be less free of smog than Wang had fantasized, but the roughness and directness of German art, which he had already studied, did not disappoint. In fact, Wang believes that the violent visual language of Anselm Kiefer, George Baselitz, or Markus Lüpertz helped liberate himself from initial rules imposed on him, and now, six years later, he mostly appreciates the tension inherent in their work. Other German artists that he considers notable for his practice are Bernard Schultze for his dynamic and warmer images, seemingly liberated from lines and forms; and Wolf Vostell, whose collages made Wang understand the relationship between the whole and the part. Perhaps the most important lesson he thinks to have learned from studying art in Berlin was the ability to ask questions, despite knowing that the answers will not be found; asking questions alone helped Wang understand motivations behind each step of the creative process.

Let me finish with highlighting yet another quality of the sponge: it is a tool that you normally use to clean bodies or objects. Although Wang uses sponge to make marks instead of cleaning, perhaps—if you allow me to speculate—its cleaning quality symbolically refers to his position in the grand history of abstract art (Wang studied the habits of cleaning in his solo exhibition at Commune, where he drew attention to the old ritual of bull washing celebrated in some parts of Austria). For a young Asian-European artist, working with abstraction, which has been burdened with historical legacies and loaded with meanings, can be challenging. On one side there is the Western postwar history of abstraction, with its celebrated movements and their revered artists (Abstract Expressionism, Color Field, Op Art, post-painterly abstraction, Minimal Art, even Zombie Formalism, to mention a few), and on the other there is rich Asian tradition with its own rules, history, and poetic resonances. These dazzling traditions could be intimidating and discouraging, while also implying that abstraction might have exhausted its formal and conceptual possibilities. Not for Wang, though. Aware of the grand narratives and legacies of Western and Chinese gestural abstraction, Wang “cleans” them symbolically with the sponges and moves forward; he absorbs them and wrings them out in order to imagine and create something new, especially because he has a social mission. In one of Wang’s favorite movies, Werk ohne Autor,6 the main character says, that in art only, freedom is not an illusion. Also, according to Kaifan Wang, by making yourself free, you are liberating the world.

1. Pliny, Natural History, trans. H. Rackham (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 1938–1962), p. 337–39.

2. Martin, K. The Flung Sponge: Techniques of Grace in the Eighteenth Century, Eighteenth-Century Studies, Volume 56, Number 1, Fall 2022, pp. 33-51 Johns Hopkins University Press.

3. Wang in conversation with Dominic Eichler, 2022, gnypgallery.com/exhibitions/whistling-dune

4. Landsman, R. in ‘Smudges, sponges and 17th-century Dutch painting’, p. 63–76 in Trading Paintings and Painters’ Materials 1550–1800, Haack Christensen, A and Jager, A. (eds), Archetype Books, 2019.

5. “My painting is so biographical, if anyone can take the trouble to read it,” Lee Krasner quoted in interview with Cindy Nemser, ‘A Conversation with Lee Krasner’, Arts Magazine, April 1973, p. 47

6. Werk ohne Autor (international title: Never Look Away), German film directed by Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck from 2018.