Wang Xiaofu: Bird on Fire

French philosopher Gaston Bachelard wrote in The Psychoanalysis of Fire that fire presents “an opportunity that evokes endless memories and creates a universally significant personal experience.” For her debut solo exhibition at CLC Gallery Venture, “Bird on Fire”, Wang Xiaofu revisited personal memories with introspection of her friendship with musician Otay:Onii. And by adopting “fire” and its related imageries, Wang expands their intimate emotional connection to notions of self-reflection, mutual illumination between creative individuals, and personal transformation and growth through artistic practice.

“My heart is trembling, like a captured little bird.” wrote Fyodor Dostoevsky in White Nights. This phrase inspired Wang’s imagination to connect the imagery of a small bird to the symbolism of the heart, which became an iconic motif that recur in many of Wang’s works. Although subjects and themes determine her compositions, these symbolic imageries evolve over time. Amid their creative exchanges, Wang perceived Otay:Onii’s musical performance as “a burning bird,” a realization that shifted the bird as an embodiment of the ‘heart’ to being the projection of her friend and their shared sense of affinity and respective creativity, as Wang says,  “A bird, the colorful part is me, and the part that sings is Otay:Onii.”

Bird on Fire, eponymous of the exhibition title, departs on a renewed journey of one’s memory. The once-contained flames (colors) now engulf the entire canvas; swiftly applied and layered brushstrokes swirl like fireworks around the bird perched on a branch. They seem to have blended together, making the sun in the background dissolve into a haze. In Wang's paintings, fire is constantly in motion, shifting, while steadily retaining an upward momentum. In After That, with its cooler tone, we find a visual inversion of Bird on Fire: entangled colors form lush, ribbon-like plants enveloping the bird’s back, as though looking back at a memory from the other side of time. In The Moment’s Gift, The Gift of the Moment, the bird has taken flight. No matter how intense the flames dance under, the viewer’s gaze is inevitably drawn to the bird’s radiant movement. In this sense, a bird in flames has gradually returned to symbolize the artist herself.

Fire, one of Wang’s most frequently rendered motifs, is not only a physical phenomenon but symbolically rooted in human imagination and the unconscious. Though formless, it holds a steady core. In “Bird on Fire”, its symbolism extends beyond the thematic subject to allegories of the artist's personal metamorphosis. Trained in photography at the Central Academy of Fine Arts, Wang Xiaofu decided to pursue painting at the Maryland Institute College of Art. While studying at CAFA, She realized early on of her distrust in constructed narratives through photography. "I'm not good at cropping reality," she once said. Painting, on the other hand, demanding of the artist’s physical and mental coordination, seemed more suitable to channel expressions of the “infinite truth” she sought through lived experience.

Looking back at her earliest paintings—at a time when Wang Xiaofu re-acquainted herself with a medium that was both familiar and new—her vibrant colors and gestural marks intuitively identified her works as “Abstract Expressionist.” With years of practice, Wang’s commendable visual vocabulary now allows her to refine the process of applying paint on canvas into a sophisticated ritual. 

Among the works on view in this exhibition, Wang applies acrylic paint to primed linen, rendering a seemingly dry, rough surface—these thinly layered, but highly saturated, colors interlock and overlay like crystal structures. In unexpected and subtle moments, she inserts surprising details, where thicker marks appear subliminal, evoking ineffable or even latent feelings. These are matched by sharp, radiant forms—flames, water, energy fields—keeping the stillness of the painting in constant and unsettling motion. Wang also assigns each painting a unifying tone, like a key to unlock its sentimental atmosphere, a sentence, or a pitch in one’s voice, to create a visual melody at times, harmonious, or dissonant with other works. Her exuberant colors are often subdued by somber blacks, setting up a contentious visual tension between ascent and resistance, leaving psychic traces that lead sublimation or even, descent. For example, in Hiding Place, swirling strokes radiate from the bottom of the canvas in clockwise and counter-clockwise directions, creating a dynamic vortex whose indistinct forms blur the lines between smoke, clouds, and the turbulence stirred by a flock of birds. Illuminated at the center, the vortex lures the viewer’s gaze inward, as does J.M.W. Turner’s Snow Storm – Steam-Boat off a Harbour’s Mouth.

Achieving these emotionally rich and technically apt works on canvas is inevitably culminated from the artist’s veracious interest in literature, theater, performance, film, music, and more. Even learning a new language offers Wang the opportunity to absorb diverse forms of expression. These interests have also prevented her from hierarchizing artistic media; hence, painting is just one of many outlets. Not to mention, it’s her appreciation of creative media other than her own had led to her friendship with Otay:Onii. Wang compares their friendship to that of Pauline and Suzanne in Agnès Varda’s film L'une chante, l'autre pas. Though the two protagonists came from entirely different backgrounds, their life tempos ultimately brought them together. Similarly, even after parting ways and living in other cities, having had disparate life experiences, growth, their creative evolutions have kept Wang and Otay close. Art has not only sparked their friendship but also carried forth their creative connection. Lu Xun’s A Farewell to the Shadow once served as the foundation for one of their spontaneous collaborative works. In this exhibition, Wang presents a work on canvas with the same title, expressing a form of farewell to the past that is incomplete—a separation not freely chosen, but one that cannot hinder the calling of life’s will. Lu Xun’s assertion that “only darkness and nothingness are real” has not led Wang to portray suffering. Instead, she translates personal experience into a reconstructed visual order—a surreal farewell in a dream-like trance, rendered in vivid and exuberant layers of color.

Wang Xiaofu has also developed the habit of writing and note-taking that lend her paintings a broader space for imagination. From some of the titles in this exhibition, viewers can discern references she has drawn from literature and philosophy. In addition to Lu Xun and Bachelard, writers such as Clarice Lispector and her seminal novel, Água Viva, has been a rewarding source of inspiration. Texts do not illustrate her artworks; instead, they function as invisible frameworks that structure perception. Lispector’s aim in Água Viva is to approach the "truth" beyond the personal, which has especially influenced Wang's translation of individual experience into a universally poetic form. Her visual structures not only convey emotion, but also spatialize it. 

Wang once remarked on her love for the image of a cross-shaped light, which naturally forms a balance between horizontal calm and vertical stability. She imagines a still lake opening its eyes—when a stone is thrown, the splash, reflection, and ripples also form a cross, shaping the moment in Throwing a Stone into the River. In In the Rain, swirling brushstrokes are dotted with star-like gleams. The exhibition Bird Is on Fire presents a highly personal yet emotionally universal language of painting, revealing Wang Xiaofu’s experimental field where she organizes emotions through visual form. In her paintings, fire is both physical and psychological; friendship is both relational and a generative method; the “bird” is a flash image—named and unnamed—that flickers between dream, memory, and language. Through outward observation and inward reflection, Wang continuously paints her imagined world—and herself within it. I Will Be Here, serving as a kind of momentary conclusion: in the fusion of a flying bird and cross-shaped light, the artist’s self becomes visible.