Wang Lijun was born in 1970 in Wendeng, the birthplace of the Quanzhen school of Taoism, Shandong Province, in a culture-loving and artistic environment. His mother was known for her drawn and embroidered still lifes with flowers in classical Chinese style, which encouraged him to start drawing at an early age.
After high school, he graduated from the Contemporary Art Department of Beijing Central Academy of Fine Arts and established himself as a professional illustrator, painter and visual artist in Songzhuang Art District, the artistic center of China, in Beijing.
He was also a visiting assistant professor at the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing. He is also currently a professor of fine arts at Ludong University in Yantai.
He is chairman of the Laiyang Oil Painting Society.
Work
In his work as an artist, Wang Lijun chooses various media, including painting, to express his thoughts, feelings and intuition.
His work appears abstract, but the flowing curved, twisted and frequently broken lines in combination with the color palette create “meaningful” forms, exploring the material, spatial, relational, social and spiritual dimensions of subtle changes in form and color in acrylic or explores oil painting.
In the spatial dimension he questions Deleuze’s theory of the fold and its possibility of change and freedom in folding lines, and in the relational and social dimensions Foucault’s theory of power relations between man and his social and natural environment in an entanglement, contrast, confrontation and conformity of forms.
The “meaning” of the forms often contains figurative associations with bionics. But a material identity always becomes immaterial, or spiritual, in the artist’s imagination.
His most important works include the “Dimension of Spirit Series” and “Dimension of Space Series”.
Exhibitions
Wang Lijun has exhibited solo in leading galleries such as Beijing Han Meilin Art Gallery, and well-known museums such as Shandong Art Museum, Todays Art Museum, Shanghai China Art Palace, National Art Museum of China, Thianhe Art Museum. His work is included in private and museum art collections.
He also participated solo in the Asian Art Fair and international exhibitions such as Native Fusion, a Chinese-South Asian Exchange Exhibition, in 2017; the Sino-British Biennale in the United Kingdom in 2018 and the Yantai-Florence Exchange Exhibition of International Modern Art in 2019.
Partly because sixteen of his paintings feature in the immensely popular Chinese TV series 《不完美受害人》, Imperfect Victims, by director Yang Yang, with a cast of famous actors and actresses, his work enjoys national fame in China and increasing fame in Asia .
