Wang Yi: Shapes from Nowhere

Wang Yi’s artistic practice originates in painting, using symbolic forms, colors, and materials as its carriers, and extends into sculpture, installation, text, collage, and other media, thereby expanding the possibilities of abstract art beyond stylistic inquiry. Wang Yi believes that the mission of abstract art lies in its capacity to bear ideas: all phenomena of human society—past, present, and future—can be manifested through fundamental forms and unique structural systems. He refers to this conceptual approach as “Grand Geometry.” As a member of a new generation of Chinese abstract artists, Wang Yi conceals responses rooted in real-world contexts beneath an abstracted surface, allowing his work to engage with China’s specific cultural context and generate new meanings.

The theme of this exhibition derives from the artist’s specially commissioned work for the ASE Foundation of the same title, Shapes from Nowhere. This “concept–form” piece is composed of two hundred items collected from publications spanning the past half century. Its inspiration comes from Zhuangzi’s Free and Easy Wandering, specifically the notion of the “Land of Nowhere” (Wuheyou zhi xiang), referring to an empty, illusory realm—symbolizing both the pure, self-contained state of abstraction and, in another sense, the absurd and playful spirit of Dadaism. The English title also draws on William Morris’s utopian socialist novel News from Nowhere, aiming to return the meaning of geometric abstraction to the richness and intensity that accompanied its original emergence.