Bio
Born in 1971 in Taiwan, Emily Wang is a painter and photographer. She also engages in printmaking and poetry writing. Initially trained as a philosopher, Wang has a master’s degree in philosophy with major interest in political philosophy and the philosophy of mind. Wang holds two MFA degrees, one in Painting and the other in Photography. She studied photography and painting with artist Lon Clark under the New York School tradition between 2004 and 2009. Later she studied painting with Philadelphia colorist Bill Scott and Jan Baltzell. Her work has won numerous prizes and has been exhibited nationally in the United States.
The complexity of experiences—both within and without—and the underlying metaphors brought about through seeing, sensing, observing, reverie, and dreams and memories are central to Wang’s work, which are unfolded through the correlation of gestural form and color in her work.
A colorist at heart, color and light are her language. Through the approach of all-over painting that forms the pictorial space with the abstract structure of figurative imagery, Wang’s work is both multi-layered and experiential. Hence, her work requires patient engagement and prolonged seeing. When viewed from various angles, the nuances of color relation and gestural movement in her painting begin to shift and merge into a new entity where each form impregnates with new forms creating a multi-faceted visual narrative.
1971年生於台灣台北市，王慶蘋為出身哲學的創作者。其主要創作媒材為繪畫、攝影與素描，並擅長版畫與詩。她首先在台灣專攻哲學，取得哲學文學士與碩士學位；後於美國專攻藝術創作，並同時擁有繪畫與攝影雙重藝術碩士學位。作品曾於美國獲全國首獎，並多次參與展出。
在藝術傳承上，王慶蘋最初與紐約學派（New York School）畫家暨攝影家朗・克拉克（Lon Clark）研習藝術攝影與繪畫，隨後師承費城色彩主義畫家比爾・史考特（Bill Scott）與珍・鮑澤爾（Jan Baltzell）。
透過觀看、感知、觀察、幻想、夢與記憶，洞察個人內在及人事與自然互動歷程中引發的複雜經驗與潛在隱喻，為她創作的核心。
作為一色彩主義者，色與光為王慶蘋的創作語言。無論繪畫或攝影，都充分展現她運用色彩關係與色光的特性建構形與色繁複的對話，激發作品張力與蘊意。此外，她運用滿幅（all-over painting）的繪畫手法、結合抽象與有機象徵形態於畫面結構中，使其作品層次多重、充滿體驗性。這是一種歷經蛻變與昇華的創造歷程——藉視覺空間結構的交互震盪，創造作品動能與情緒張力，進而轉化為觀者感性經驗內涵與視覺隱喻。
其作品講求慢觀、浸淫與持續發現。同時，來自作品旺盛的生命力，也促使觀者以動態視角與之全面相遇，讓豐富的色彩層次、暗示的筆觸與線條共同交織出潛在新形態：在不斷流轉與游移的視角中，形得以不斷孕育新型，為其作品創造多重的視覺內涵與敘事可能。
Statement
ON PAINTING
Painting is a mysterious and profound process that resides in passion and faith. It is both a timeless and a temporal pursuit. I work from both observation and imagination. My purpose is to create a sensate equivalent of my experience through insight into a world of form, color and space. This is a transformative process – engaging a visual energy and qualities of emotional tension through the dynamics of visual syntax, which in turn creates feeling and narrative. It is the unification of both the cognitive and sensate that makes this experience of visual discovery meaningful to me.
I see drawing as the perception and fixing of structure; I see painting as drawing with color – and to me, color is light. I work toward creating an equivalent of the visual forces I experience in my subject – physical or symbolic – through the qualities of paint. I am exploring the idea of “all over painting” – a construction that is worked throughout the canvas and out to the edges without a focal point per se. As a part of this process, I am attracted to a compressed pictorial space formed through the abstract structure of figurative imagery.
Being a painter involves communicating with the continuum of painting – in finding the living past. My work references both modernist and classic Asian painting spatially. It also requires the searching out of one’s authentic self, a quality that can only originate in one’s response to one’s own time.
As a visual artist, for me seeing is touching, seeing is feeling and truly seeing is knowing.
On Photography
Photography’s potential as visual art is to draw with light, and this is the intent of my work. I use light and its counterpart－shadow, two complementary elements to sculpt the photographic space; to remove objects from their original context and utilitarian purposes, to shape their presence with different qualities of light, and transform them into aesthetic forms. Nuance of color and color cast in my work depicts the sensuousness of light comprising visual form and visual harmonics.
There is an abstract quality in my dealing with representational content in photography inviting the visual appreciation of aesthetic form on both intellectual and emotional levels. For me, photography speaks two languages. It represents and it creates and so embodies thought and feeling.