Zhiqian Wang is an artist working across a wide range of media, including traditional Gongbi paintings, installations, video, and films. Taking premises from theoretical physics and philosophy, she uses materials drawn from daily life and media embedded with its own history. Her practice investigates both the limitations and potential of the apparatus of which we acquire knowledge, whether through language, logic, or empirical perception, questioning how we arrive at where we are and the conditions that preceded us. Trained in the analytic philosophy tradition, her work engages with pluralism, reflected across a variety of media, histories, themes, symbolisms and motifs, including possible worlds, twins, black holes, and many others.
Her installations, as in Twins, Twilight, and Apple Tree, are influenced by the later work of Ludwig Wittgenstein, especially his notion of language games. Rather than relying on fixed definitions, her work explore how meaning emerges through practice: how a gesture, a material, or a word acquires meanings within specific contexts. The exhibition stage situations in which such contexts are unstable or shifting, allowing the viewer to engage with objects and symbols whose meaning is neither fixed nor entirely open. The installations become structures where meaning must be actively constructed, or, at times, withheld. In her Gongbi paintings, she incorporates speculative cosmological structures, symbolism to traditional technique from two thousands years ago. In films, she investigates how meaning is constructed, deferred, or destabilized through the interplay between image and sign, engaging with the material processes of analog media. Instead of addressing philosophical propositions directly, her work constructs experimental systems that test the boundaries of meanings and questions through image, concept, and perception.
She recently had solo shows: “Twins, Twilight, and Apple Tree”, “Moonlight of the Twins”, “Red or White Roses” and “Earth and Jerry”, and a two-person show: "Capital Investigation." Her works have also been shown at The Jewish Museum, Contemporary Arts Center (CAC), Czong Institute for Contemporary Art Museum, Lenfest Center for the Arts, ACT at MIT, and Harvard Medical School among others. She had also participated in performances at MoMA Ps1, Performa Biennial, ACT at MIT, and MassArt Art Museum. She was invited as a guest lecturer in the theoretical computer science department at Harvard University and has collaborated with scholars and researchers in different fields of science. She holds an MFA from Columbia University and currently lives and works in New York City.