Wang Qifeng: The Deep Blue of Time

Wang Qifeng’s works arise from the artist’s direct observation of nature in situ. Through painting, he reflects on the relationship between nature and human activity, while using the act of painting itself as a means of approaching nature as he conceives it. This exhibition brings together two series created over the past three years: paintings of Antarctic ice and Polynesian coral atolls. At its core is the contrast between deep time and lived time—the immense difference between geological timescales and the span of a human life—and the speculative space opened up by this disparity in scale.

Wang Qifeng’s paintings reconcile natural landscapes with human perception through the interplay of presence and absence, line, and layered colour. By distilling and synthesising the landscape, he turns painting into a mediator between reason and instinct. At the same time, his work raises deeper questions about contemporary conceptions of nature: amid the proliferation of scientific and social-media imagery, and against the backdrop of the Anthropocene, how can art offer a different way of understanding nature? And how might personal spiritual practice respond to the excessive consumption of the natural world? These works not only mark the evolution of the artist’s individual visual language, but also demonstrate that painting retains a critical and thought-provoking capacity beyond the realm of aesthetics.