“Wang Yancheng — Big Bang, Metamorphoses of the Void”

"There is a light in the soul, where time

and space never penetrated. Everything that time and

space have touched never reached this light.

And man must remain in this light"

- Meister Eckhart

"To live is to go beyond ourselves"

- Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

"Art enables us to find ourselves

and lose ourselves at the same time"

- Thomas Merton

Energy, transformation, becoming, authenticity, purity, liberation from obsessions, feeling the soul without explanations. Despite words being inadequate to give even the slightest idea of true art, one can try and use these concepts to approach Wang Yancheng's absolute painting. This shall be intended in its etymological sense of what is loose and free from any tie and even from the sever-al artistic references summoned in the past for his research (Zao Wou-Ki, Chu Teh-Chun, Claude Monet, American Color Field Abstraction, Gerhard Richter, etc.) and by now, completely metabolized in a deeply personal language, a sort of hybrid absorbing and reinventing the fertile dialogue between the East and the West. Thus, it was a real privilege seeing Wang Yancheng enter the Galleria dell'Accademia in Florence full of emotions and respect, so much so that he was speech-less when approaching Michelangelo's sublime and "definitive" works-all the more since this year we celebrate the 550th anniversary of his birth (1475). Nevertheless, for Wang Yancheng, it is completely normal to establish ideal and surprising connections with the great Masters of art history. For instance, the artist often imagines and realizes in his paintings ideal and arrowed trajectories that connect different areas of the artwork in a surprising variation and reinvention of the golden ratio and the Renaissance perspective axes, reflecting on the ratio of volume to surface.

On the occasion of the first on-site visit at the Galleria dell'Accademia, Wang Yancheng breathed in and out many times, as to create a blank slate and prepare himself for the stunning and dazzling encounter with Michelangelo. Besides, one cannot help but sharing what the artist-born in China and French by adoption-claims: "Aesthetic perception is a brief stop in a state void of identity. As soon as identity appears, beauty disappears." Before Michelangelo, it is necessary to annul one's own ego and let oneself go through the emotional earthquake of his works to reach a deeper awareness of oneself. "Buonarroti's last sculptures-as Wang Yancheng told me once we were out that museums of marvels-seem to extract infinite soul and energy from natural forms, making the appearance almost irrelevant. Just like Rothko's works, they do not emphasize appearance but rather emotions and content, purifying language as far as reaching the soul and generating an energy wave that never vanishes. I am greatly impressed by Michelangelo's late works. While other artists were still busy copying the appearance from nature, he had already opened a dialogue with God, abandoning any superficiality to aim directly at the eternal transmission and manifestation of energy waves. To this day, his creations appear very lively and powerful. Whether sculptures, paintings or works of architecture, his works reveal a vital force going beyond the visible, touching the same essence of existence. In his sculptures, Michelangelo did not limit himself to represent anatomical perfection, but he captured the inner energy, the movement of the soul. Each line, each curve seems to vibrate in a dynamic tension, as if the stone was animated by a cosmic force. Michelangelo teaches us that art is not only representation but a bridge toward high-er dimensions, where energy and spirit merge into a unique and eternal manifestation. His works keep inspiring, reminding us that art is an act of connection with the universe and the infinite." These reflections are essential to understand Wang Yancheng's state of mind when he entered this place sacred to him, bringing his own works with great humility and as a tribute to Michelangelo. And with the proper proportions, it would be advisable to breathe in and out deeply, even before seeing this exhibition, which leads us to another dimension, in a field of spiritual energy, beyond pure individual expression.

To Wang Yancheng-also due to his deep philosophical and scientific studies-life is not something static. It is a circular path, made of wait and action, a constant tension toward self-fulfillment in relation to the whole. There are no absolute certainties nor final destinations. There is only a deep path, where everything changes and persists at the same time, and where even pain, conflict, doubt are essential parts for growing. He is fascinated by the idea of “death of the self” as a rebirth, without fearing that the Self can disappear but thinking of it as a condition for a more aware and true life. This is realized through painting, understood as a constant dance between the finite and the infinite, loss and rediscovery. One of his main goals is a vibrant totality and unity of immaterial energies, which seem to find their worthy poetical equivalent in these verses by Rabindranath Tagore: "The same stream of life/that runs through my veins / night and day runs through the world / and dances in rhythmic measures./ It is the same life that shoots / in joy through the dust of the earth / in numberless blades of grass and breaks into tumultuous waves /of leaves and flowers. / It is the same life/that is rocked/in the ocean-cradle / of birth and of death, / in ebb and in flow. / I feel my limbs/are made glorious by the touch/of this world of life./And my pride / is from the life-throb of ages/ dancing in my blood / this moment." Furthermore, in the context of Wang Yancheng's wide philosophical-religious knowledge, the Taoist idea of reintegration of the man in the cosmic order is crucial. This idea was not in fact limited to the followers of Taoism but shaped the whole Chinese culture, even outside this philosophical-religious current. The main purpose is to restore the harmony with Principle through a return to the original state, a primordial condition, so to speak, and through the liberation of natural spontaneity and instinct. Painting is then a "living" testimony of a process toward the universal, or toward the unicity of the infinite: the limitless non-explicit. As Wang Yancheng said to Tuo Wang, author of the beautiful text Anarchy of the Middle Path: An Artistic Profile of Wang Yancheng, "I think what Chinese culture has imparted to me the most is the relationship between man and the universe, that is, our Buddhism and Eastern philosophy. For instance, 'form is void'. Perhaps, all energy and matter are different forms, even light, color and atmosphere of our paintings are infinite. Human beings are already finished in themselves. Each of us is a Buddha, a manifestation of cosmic existence." As Tuo Wang wrote, Laozi, the founder of Taoism, described the concept of form as the manifest part of creation, and the spirit as the non-manifest part. He claimed: "The great voice is soundless; the great form is formless. Dao (which is the essence of each thing in Chinese philosophy) remains hidden and nameless." Thus, Wang Yancheng, in his unveiling of a vibrant connection between science, spirituality and art, is enthusiast about the scenarios opening up to the possibility of an authentic dialogue between cosmology and theology, beyond religious beliefs. As Guido Tonelli explains: "Measuring it thanks to precision astrophysics, the global energy of the universe is equal to zero. Now, zero is the energy of the vacuum state. If the universe is a vacuum state having a zero-point energy, a null angular momentum and a null charge, that is, the same quantum numbers of void, then we are dealing with a transformation, a metamorphosis. Big Bang is a metamorphosis of the void. The beauty of void in transformation. Today it is spring, I see flowers, plants, birds, the sky, clouds. Everything is absolutely amazing. It is something extraordinary that a vacuum state - apparently little significant, interesting, colorful-can present in the amazing form before our eyes." Thus, we must go beyond the Western prejudice that void is nothing. As Tonelli explained, "Vacuum is a material state seething with possibilities. The deeper we go, the more we realize how we really are just a cog in a precious machine, in all its elements, even those we have considered humble or little significant for thousands of years"[1]. We must not forget the intuition of Werner Karl Heisenberg, Nobel laureate in Physics in 1932 and one of the founders of quantum mechanics: "The same forces determining the visible order of the world, existence and the characteristics of elements, the formation of crystals, the birth of life, may be at work also in the creative process of human mind." In this way, we can return to Wang Yancheng, to the void full of potentialities in expansion in his recent paintings, those of 2024 and in particular of this year, which were released from any previous dazzling naturalistic remains. This is the umpteenth stage of an absolute path, more and more "unbound from" any conditioning and very long - a difficult process of intellectual and inner liberation started with releasing "the mind from the training received previously," as he said himself.

Wang Yancheng's pictorial "Big Bang" was born as a vital and spring style of the creation act. It is a sort of energetic metamorphosis of the void which generates and welcomes, as he said to Tuo Wang, "the preconscious, uncontrollability and imperfection. Everything occurs in a natural state, where mutual obstacles generate events and energy. In the past, I always tried to create a perfect work of art, but the result was the opposite. Because the 'classic', common standard for society does not represent the real me. What distinguishes my cells and my DNA from the others' is abandoning obsessions, opening and overcoming those seals weighing on me, in order to express myself freely through painting. If you are calm and you reflect before drawing, you will already be thinking within a formed system. The most beautiful things are created in a semi-accidental state, as if they were on the verge of failing... before starting to paint, I try to simplify the complexity of the world as much as possible, so that body and mind are quiet and not bothered by the external world. I am immersed in a beautiful energy state. Both clarity and uncertainty are present in the pictorial process. I pay more attention to showing the creation process than meticulous technique. An involuntary experience, an imperfect perfection, an unreal reality: a non-interventionist intervention, a natural and spontaneous manifestation that must have an intermittent rhythm. To generate a kind of energy, one enters accidental beauty of being and non-being." Events, waves, sparks, deflagrations, the trace - a body that seems to be materialized in the W for Wang, sudden deviations of lines and colors, creation accidents, layering and "geological" thickening or flashes of transparent air, space-time displacement, suspensions and fluctuations of magmatic forms and dances create a vibrant field where traces of the artist's inner life are left, trying to directly connect with the pulse of the universe and cosmic existence, with the mystery that is the world. If one observes his artworks, one can notice that each element (spots, signs, dripping, etc.) is linked to others in ways sometimes evident and sometimes almost invisible, by overlapping, impacts, trails, smear, streaks, in a sort of both biological and cosmic tissue. The purest part of conscience, the states of matter and being: everything seems to merge and regenerate tirelessly. Painting is nurturing the inner life with this breath of expansion and cosmic embrace, renewing men's natural and immemorial desire to express their relationship with the Absolute through art. Thus, we enter a sort of super-infinite (as John Donne, the sublime and unclassifiable poet, taught us).Wang Yancheng's painting is precisely dedicated to the invisible and ineffable, in stark contrast to that great part of contemporary artists who no longer work on form but on a sort of chronicle of current topics, keeping informing us on what we already know: environmentalism, postcolonialism, patriarchy, neo-feminism, human migrations, non-binary sexuality, and more in general, the rights of the LQBTQ+ community.

The path of the exhibition respects and enhances the structure of the exhibiting halls with their straight trajectory, without deviations, favoring an intense dialogue between the artworks hung on the close walls, creating a sort of continuous immersion in the spiritual reality of this painting, capable of releasing calm energy and a vibrant welcome.

If, to this day, scientists seek a unified theory of all physics, from quantum mechanics to relativity theory, from the infinitesimal electron to immense galaxies, in intuitive ways, Wang Yancheng has already reached this, mutatis mutandis, through his absolute painting. From this point of view, there seems to be an analogy between the artist's creative reflection and Albert Einstein's "cosmic religion", with a new kind of consciousness that could define itself as "a part of Infinity". As Kieran Fox wrote recently, Einstein's spirituality was "an almost alchemical amalgam of mind and matter, a novel synthesis of noble spirituality and exquisite science." He continued: "The cosmic religion called for a quantum leap in consciousness, for a full and final recognition that the physical reality studied by science and the fantastic realms explored by the spirit were really one and the same"[2]. Today in particular, one feels the need to create a new theory combining science and spirituality and ending materialism and reductionism, which have been characterizing the human path of knowledge for a long time. Furthermore, according to the great physician Emilio Del Giudice, who passed away in 2014, our society is still founded on economic laws that contradict biological ones. In the former case, competition, conflict and war prevail, whereas cooperation is the main law in biology. As Del Giudice argued: "Therefore, if living organ-isms-which are an ensemble of molecules performing many actions as a whole - worked according to the principles of classical physics, they would have to pay a massive energy bill. And this is not the case. Quantum physics comes to our aid. Its foundation is that the principle of inertia fails because any body in the universe floats spontaneously. Thus, it is impossible to separate matter from movement, because it is not inert, but it moves and fidgets. Now one may wonder: are the fluctuations of each body independent from the fluctuations of another body? Is it not possible to have a state of matter where fluctuations are gradually eliminated and chaotic agitation is transformed into a dance, a concert?"[3]. And do fluctuating forms and signs precisely seem to dance in a mutual relationship in Wang Yancheng's artworks? Well, he strongly believes in this synergy between science and spirituality, and his painting is oriented toward this. "From a cognitive point of view, artworks are completely separated from the empirical system and exist beyond transcendence. Our exploration of the truth of existence will lead us to interact with the universe. Human beings must communicate with the sky and the Earth and then return to the world of men," said Wang Yancheng to us while looking at Michelangelo's artworks, with ineffable relief and solace.