Kaifan Wang · 王凯凡

Kaifan Wang (b. 1996; Inner Mongolia) grew up the region of the Gobi Desert, exposed to different cultures from an early age. Trained in calligraphy and familiar with traditional Chinese landscape painting, he kept on expanding his artistic and geographic horizon, moving from Beijing and Shanghai to Florence and Berlin, a city he has called home for the past ten years. This nomadic lifestyle is also source of different influences he integrates in his pictorial practice – in line with a rich history of cross-cultural exchange between artists from the East and the West embracing the abstract idiom, often with a strong gestural dimension. But unlike some of the Western modernists he admires, banning every sense of narrative or outer painterly reference, Wang’s memories of his place of birth – probably triggered by the geographical distance – daily observations and socio-political events trickle down in a sublimated manner in his multi-layered compositions. He also often adds references to the region where he is exhibiting his work by means of a central theme, motive, or dominant colour scheme. In the past, he made a series in blue, referring to Delft blue pottery, the result of Chinese-Dutch trade relations; gold, as a reference to the goldrush in California which attracted a high amount of Chinese fortune seekers for an exhibition in Los Angeles; or yellow, evoking the Gobi Desert from his childhood.

Recent solo exhibitions of Wang were shown at GNYP, Antwerp; BLUM, Los Angeles; GNYP, Berlin and Commune Gallery, Vienna. Wang's works have been shown in numerous institutional group exhibitions, including at the Museum Kampa, Prague; the Yuz Museum, Shanghai; TANK, Shanghai; the Songwon Art Center, Seoul; the Shanghai Himalayas Museum, Shanghai and the FLUXUS+ Museum, Potsdam. Wang was featured in "Influential 2023: Forbes China Contemporary Young Artists" and won the Ivan Juritz Prize 2022, funded by King’s College London and Mahler & LeWitt Studios in Spoleto, Italy. The first monograph of his work was released in October 2024 and was published by GNYP Gallery.

His work is included in the permanent collections of the Yuz Foundation, Shanghai; Pond Society, Shanghai; the Wigam Collection, Prague; Hanwha Foundation of Culture, Seoul and Louis Vuitton, Paris among others.

The artist studied in Shanghai and Florence, before completing his Fine Arts education with a Diploma and Meisterschüler at the Universität der Künste in Berlin in 2022.

Wang currently lives and works in Berlin.