Wang Du was born in Wuhan, PR China, in 1956. An iconoclast and conceptual deconstructivist, he probes the context of contemporary communication, taking grafts and samples, alienating them and thus highlighting new aspects of otherwise mundane, everyday items. When, for instance, he creates a larger-than-life female figure represented in a distorted view, the distortion is less a visual tool than it is a manifestation of a concept, of ideas. There are “distorted” mediaeval Madonnas, but that disproportioning served as a tool: the figure was high above ground and its distortion counterbalanced the distortion we experience when looking at something high up. Wang Du’s large, distorted women materialize the idea that the (male) preoccupation with sexually attractive women, as disseminated and propagated in the media, is a distortion of the psychological kind.

He has said, "I organize my projects just like the media does with reality." (1) His works are therefore based on precise analyses of what’s happening in our media-dominated culture, and his direct, formal response to these processes gives birth to a terrible beauty, an ironic parody of whatever subject he touches.

This is a common procedure in much modern and contemporary art, but Wang Du emphasises it, bringing its core to the foreground. Ever since the advent of modernism, “ironic identification” seems the only way of dealing with things past (2) and any old myth must be re-formed, re-shaped, and re-filled, in order to exert influence on contemporary experience and thinking. This is Wang Du’s world; but, as an artist, he also employs aesthetics. Thus, terrible things may be around, but there’s beauty as well.

(1) Michel Nuridsany: China Art Now. Paris, 2004, p. 71

(2) See Hans-Robert Jauss: Allegorese, Remythisierung und neuer Mythos, in: Terror und Spiel. Probleme der Mythenrezeption. Ed. By Manfred Fuhrmann, Munich 1971, pp. 187-209