The stoics distinguished between substances and events, which they called incorporeal. For them, everything that exists is a body, even things that to us seem immaterial: the soul, heat, cold, dryness, humidity, sounds and colors. Beside bodies, however, there are incorporeal events, the effects that a body produces on another body: a knife that cuts flesh produces in it the event of being wounded or cut, the name assigned to something produces in it the event of being said or named. "Every body thus becomes the cause of something incorporeal for another body. "This is not a being or a state, but a manner or mode of being, not another body, but an impalpable attribute, which, as such, can be better expressed by a verb than a noun. It is as if in every body there took place an incorporeal, which is not a substantial quality, but an occurrence, a gesture, an indication that dances, so to speak, on the surface. The stone is a body, but the being immobile is an incorporeal event; the fever is a body, but the feverishness, the sudden rise in temperature is incorporeal; white is a quality of the snow, but the snow-being-white is an event. The stoics-as a historian of philosophy has noted-radically separate, as no one had done before, two planes of existence: on the one hand the deep and real being, bodies, and on the other the events that are produced on their skin, a multitude of incorporeals without preestablished constraints or ends.
Starting from this penetrating stoic distinction it is possible to understand what occurs on the canvases of Wang Yancheng. The color, so skillfully spread or poured on the canvas, is not a substance, not a body, however alchemically reduced: it is an incorporeal event. Not red or green or yellow-which are still bodies-but being red, greening, the ecstasy or agony of yellow, as intangible yet pointed, even ferocious events. The stoics defined what is perhaps the most important of their incorporeals with the term "sayable" (lekton), which in Greek is a verbal form expressing an attitude or a possibility, and not a completed action. We can, then, speak of the events that populate Wang's canvases in the same way: not color, but colorable; not writing, which, following a profound trait in the tradition of Chinese painting, the brush scatters - ever more frequently in recent years - among the colors, but writable; not buds or calyxes of flowers in which at times signs seem to congeal and colors to plunge, but flowerable, indeed efflorescible. And if Wang's canvases are stubbornly untitled, if they cannot have names, is it not perhaps because they are purely and simply nameable?
Wang's incorporeal events have no real fixed place, but, precisely, they bloom and emerge; they do not remain silent, but confabulate; they do nothing but ceaselessly surface, they seep out and immediately dive back in-but where and whence? Franz Marc said of his images that they are nothing but the "ecstatic emergence in another place." But what is this other place toward which Wang's incorporeals are also traveling? And whence do the orange, the yellow, the red, the ochre in the extraordinary Untitleds of 2023 spring up, hesitantly or peremptorily, abruptly or smoothly, to then nimbly dive into themselves? And the blue or grey background of these same paintings is not a background, but a threshold - surfacing once again, only surfacing. And it does not matter whether the threshold is horizontal, as in the oversized Untitled of 2021, or vertical: in every case what is at issue is not a state of things, but an event.
The most special quality - the arch-event, so to speak - that defines the events of Wang's painting is, in fact, that it is like the brief, broken, fickle crossing between two unnamable places. Looking at his canvases, we are carried away to another invisible place, to which the canvas is a passage, at once fleeting and urgent, unavoidable and yet contingent. But is this not perhaps the definition of all true painting: to be a passage and a threshold, that is, a "where" and at the same time an "elsewhere" - an impossible dwelling, where we would give anything to live?
January, 2023