Wang Taocheng

Still Lifes: Wild Ducks and Swans Arrive in Frankfurt,ink, watercolor, mineral pigment, tea water, gold powder, xuan paper, 356 x 33 cm, 2012

This work is still about my life in Frankfurt, and it describes my terribly depressing life there through landscapes and still lifes. The work takes the local landscape as its focus and depicts the flood of the River Main in 2011, where swans floated slowly and elegantly down the street.
The work also incorporates still lifes from the kitchen table in my apartment. I chose this painting format because of something I learned in a recent art class, a kind of paradox of artworks. It doesn’t matter how you create something, you can never separate yourself from the materials – their literary connotations and background stories. Especially being an artist, there is no way for you to escape the process of employing references and interpreting works. Good works almost always involve classical references and encyclopedic wisdom combined with a political fervor.
Although the advantages of changing points of view and lateral thinking are inherent in the process of creation, they can also become disadvantages. In my mind, the most independent things are still lifes and landscapes. Figures are comparably independent, that is to say, figures are not as cold as the former. So the things in the painting are quite showy, but also empty at the same time.
The work is divided into three parts. The content of the painting is very figurative. For instance, for the still life section of the first part (from right to left), I intentionally employed a realistic commercial cartoon style to create a not fully realized feeling of depression. This reminds me of the flowers in my apartment. It doesn’t matter where my roommate puts them; there is always something wrong with the atmosphere. Maybe this is because two people once died in my apartment. To put it in local parlance, there is bad “fengshui.” It’s a haunted house. At the same time it hints that at something my Chinese friends and I experience in Frankfurt: terrible dreams during the full moon － something we never experience in China. The moon seen from China always contains a sense of historic beauty, but still lacks the ability to bring us comfort.