Zhan Wang

© Photo credit：Tony Metaxas

© Photo credit：Tony Metaxas

Utopia Garden was first exhibited as a themed exhibition at the National Art Museum of China, Beijing. It consists of three parts, namely rockeries, the contemporary metropolis and religious belief. The design idea originally results from an experimental creation of the first stainless steel rockery in 1995, when China's industrial construction first started along with large-scale urban renewal. It looks like a small metal stone, but is designed based on the consideration of how China, an ancient civilization with a history of several thousand years, connects with the modern world. The rockeries seem as if they reflect the conflict and contradiction between traditional and the modern cultures, but, in fact, the new aesthetic effects they have brought about cannot be created by either traditional or modern methods alone. It is even true that if there was no such modern material as stainless steel, the special aesthetic beauty of the rockeries could never have been fully demonstrated; without this symbol of local culture neither could the rockeries have such a unique modern natural beauty. In accordance with the function of rockeries in traditional Chinese gardens, the stainless steel rockeries are designed to find the switching point between western modernism and the oriental tradition, and demonstrate a series of concepts and considerations through specific and unique aesthetics under extremely current circumstances.

Zhan Wang

Born in 1962 in Beijing, China.
Lives and works in Beijing.

Zhan Wang is among the most respected artists in China, having become world-renowned for his stainless steel sculptures of "scholars' rocks," the graceful, craggy boulders found in several provinces around China that seem to have been sculpted by natural forces into complex forms worthy of thoughtful contemplation – almost like mental or spiritual landscapes. He is a professor at the Sculpture Department of the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing. His works were the first contemporary sculptures of China to be collected and displayed in Deyang Museum in San Francisco, and in the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, in the United States.

Recent solo shows :
2008: Zhan Wang, Garden Utopia, National Art Museum of China, Beijing, China; Rocks into Gold, Asian art museum, San Francisco, California (USA); 86 Divinity Figures, Long March Space, Beijing 798; Zhan Wang, Hannise Gallery. 2006: Zhan Wang - Urban Landscape-Beijing, Williams College Museum of Art, Williamstown, Massachusetts (USA). 2005: Flowers in the Mirror, Han art Gallery, Hong Kong, China.