向日葵与枯萎包谷林 2022

Curator: Wang Xinfu’s work, created in 2022, is before us: "Sunflowers and Decayed Buckwheat in the Valley". The impasto oil paint practically leaps from the surface. What do you see first? Editor: I'm immediately struck by the overwhelming density. It’s a landscape, yes, but rendered with such textural ferocity it verges on abstraction. The materiality itself feels like the primary subject, more so than any easily discernible scene. Curator: Indeed. Sunflowers, particularly, are loaded with symbolism. Throughout history they’ve been associated with adoration, loyalty, and longevity— though perhaps these drooping forms speak more of transient beauty. What does this abundance, then ruin suggest? Editor: It screams labor. Look at the thickness of that paint! I imagine the physical act of layering on pigment, stroke after stroke. It speaks to the physical labor inherent not only in art-making, but also in cultivating a landscape— the artist has created such intense build-up using oil-based pigments that one can imagine both tilling the soil to sow a seed, but also carefully manipulating the materials and matter into form. It collapses distinctions between artist labor and agrarian endeavor. Curator: The choice of matter-painting and heavy impasto surely amplifies the emotional weight. Note the deep furrows in the paint. Does the heavy layering express the sorrow after the prime, or even loss and mourning? The withering vegetation set against an agitated sky almost suggests a prelude to destruction. Editor: Or a post-harvest field? We bring so many connotations of 'natural' life cycles when looking at art and materials -- but the material reality of that field involves fertilizers, harvesting tools, global commodity flows... Seeing all of these as active social-production really pushes beyond any single memento-mori narrative, to also examine the artist’s participation in this circulation of value and labor. It certainly complicates notions of 'nature' with reminders of social artifice and toil. Curator: A field, a canvas: Both initially barren, both imbued with meaning through cultivation. Thanks for bringing the making and materials to the forefront, I did not think about the toil that might lead to sorrow. Editor: And thanks for pointing towards how sorrow, indeed life, itself relies upon the endless re-shaping of physical matter by those toiling in these fields.