Zhan Wang is widely recognized as one of China's leading contemporary artists today. Working in installation, photography and video, his sculpturally informed practice challenges ideas of landscape and environment, addressing the urban, rural, artificial and industrial. Zhan Wang's art is a particular perspective fundamentally anchored in his relationship to his own cultural heritage.
But his pieces also suggest a distinctly contemporary Chinese take on Western abstract sculpture, even a kind of bleak, ironic salute to the defeat of the values of Asian nature-inspired tradition by an industrial modernism, ruthlessly reprised in China first by Mao and his regime, now by the state capitalism that has followed. [http://www.sfgate.com/entertainment/article/Zhan-Wang-s-mercurial-monuments-3293740.php]
Zhan Wang’s practice is firmly rooted in the culture by which he has been surrounded with over the course of his life and traditional Chinese understanding, whilst at the same time attempting to interpret the features of traditional culture from an individual perspective and by means of a distinctive creativity deduce anew and poetically transpose the effects of history, traditions, the spirit, the natural world onto the human situation and perceptions via his works by enfolding subject matter from urbanization, artificial simulation and industrialization, alongside the materials used in the works themselves which lead to the creation of an entirely different connotation. [http://www.longmarchspace.com/zhan-wang-2/]