Wang, Yehan

Biography

Yehan Wang explores abstraction through his work in painting and photography. Through the systematic application of repetitive brushstrokes, Wang not only addresses abstraction in terms of painterly application, but also how paint becomes the subject of the work. Devoid of the colours that identify the markings made on the painted canvas, Wang’s manipulated photographs take the angles, lines, and textures of mundane bicycles and tubing, abstracting the content through the form, and its repetition.

A loyalty to the formalist approach is evoked in the meticulous treatment of colour, line, shape, and texture in the practice of artist Yehan Wang. This formalism is not only rendered through his treatment of the material, but also in the dual reliance between content and form. Influenced by the practices of Paul Klee and Wassily Kandinsky, Wang has developed a practice rooted in abstraction and its relation to the spiritual.

Yehan Wang was born in Shanghai, China in 1959. Graduating from the Shanghai Academy of Fine Arts in 1980, he exhibited China for 15 years before immigrating to Canada, and continuing his studies in Graphic Design at George Brown College in Toronto. Wang is a resident of Coquitlam, splitting his time between Vancouver and Shanghai. Wang’s art has been exhibited in galleries and museums throughout China, Singapore, Japan and North America.