Among the verdant jungles of Xiao Wang’s canvases, eucalyptus turns electric blue, ferns glow with orange fire, and gingko leaves pulse violet as though lit from some unearthly source. Figures emerge from this spectral foliage—quiet, languid, and intimate—yet veiled in a tension that feels both tender and unsettling.

Born in China and now based in Brooklyn, Wang paints not strangers but companions: friends, partners, even himself. Their closeness becomes visible through his palette of distortion, where color is never obedient but charged with psychic weight. Flesh and greenery are bent, exaggerated, irradiated into otherworldliness. His portraits invite us into suspended states—half-dream, half-dread—where time stretches and stillness quivers.

Fluorescent Gardens of Unease

Wang has said he strives for contrast and balance: light against dark, violet against red, unease against intimacy. His portraits are not content to remain within realism, though their detail insists on observational rigor. Instead, he walks the tightrope between naturalism and expressionism, grafting painterly discipline onto visions heightened by expressive, distorted color.

The results radiate unease. A figure reclines, serene, but the foliage crackles with menace; a face rests in shadow, yet the leaves behind it blaze unnaturally bright. These contrasts echo a wider anxiety: the unease of our own historical moment—political, environmental, psychological.

Echoes of Goya and Cinematic Romanticism

In his work Slumber Under a Shade, Wang channels Goya’s haunting etching The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters. Like Goya, he uses visual distortion to register the dissonance of his time—an era riddled with cultural upheaval, ecological fracture, and ideological tension.

Yet Wang is no pessimist. He aligns himself with post-Enlightenment art, absorbing Romanticism’s emotional intensity and cinematography’s narrative framing. His paintings resist the neatness of story; instead, they construct psychological atmospheres—landscapes of the mind more than episodes of fact.

Moons, Hands, and Familiar Faces

Recurring symbols—the moon, the hand, the familiar face—thread through Wang’s practice. The moon, traditionally a symbol of clarity and mystery, is repurposed again and again until it becomes slippery, unstable, a glyph in constant metamorphosis.

Hands, which he calls both difficult and pleasurable to paint, become emblems of touch, labor, and vulnerability. Their sensual presence in his canvas’s grounds the surreal foliage, reminding us that beyond fluorescent fantasy lies the human body—tender, fallible, reaching outward.

His choice of subjects—friends, lovers, himself—adds another layer of intimacy. These are not anonymous models but participants in a private cosmology. Each portrait becomes an act of recognition, a kind of visual diary where personal bonds are refracted through color into near-mythic forms.

Walking the Threshold

Xiao Wang is a painter of thresholds. He does not resolve realism and expressionism but lets them clash and cohabit, just as fluorescent foliage presses against human flesh in his canvases. His work thrives in this tension, vibrating between the recognizable and the surreal.

In his hands, color is not decoration but distortion, not enhancement but revelation. It illuminates the fractures of our moment—the unease beneath intimacy, the anxiety within stillness, the monsters that sleep just beneath reason. Wang’s portraits remind us that to look at another person is never a neutral act; it is always a negotiation of light and shadow, desire and fear, presence and dream.