Statement / Bio
Tuo Wang creates multi-narrative spectacles where often humorous and absurd aspects of society are exposed. He often takes inspiration from imagery and narratives of epic characters depicted throughout art history. In this photography, he has inserted elements of Anthony van Dyck’s painting Samson and Delilah (1628-1630) into a dimension of the daily reality of a subway stop on the M Line. The resulting effect is one of emotional ambiguity intertwining biblical dramatic moment and everyday experience. Tuo Wang’s practice attempts to examine the unreliable relationship between contemporary human status, myth and cultural archive.
Born in Changchun, China in 1984, RU alum Wang Tuo currently lives and works between New York and Beijing. Represented by the prestigious White Space Gallery in Beijing, Wang Tuo was a 2015-2017 artist-in-residence at the Queens Museum. His work is in the following permanent collections: Today Art Museum, Beijing, Tsinghua University Art Museum, Beijing, Fareast Art Museum, Changchun, Junding Art Institute, Beijing, China, Hihey Art Center, Beijing, China Howard Gotlieb Archival Research Center, Boston, Boston University Mugar Memorial Library, Boston.
Recent exhibitions include: Myths We don’t Outgrow, solo exhibition, White Space Gallery, Beijing, 2017, Salt Project, Monkey Grammarians, Beijing, 2017, Roadside Picnic, Chambers Fine Art, New York, 2017, “Nine”, Queens Museum, New York, 2017 “A Little Violence of Organized Forgetting”, Taikang Space, Beijing, China, 2016; “The Real Thing”, National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts,Taichung City, 2015; “Peekskill Project VI”, Hudson Valley Center for Contemporary Art, Peekskill, USA 2015; Tirana International Film Festival, Art Basel 2016, TEN Multimedia Center, Tirana, Albania 2015; “Re-make/ Re-build/Re-stage”, VoxPopuli, Aux Performance Center, Philadelphia, USA 2015.
Tuo is a graduate of the Biology Department at Northeast Normal University, Changchun. In 2012 he received an MA in Painting from Tsinghua University, Beijing and in 2014, he graduated from the School of Visual Art at Boston University with an MFA in Painting.
Artist website: http://tuo-wang.com/