ALLEN WANG

Born in a small village on the Loess Plateau in Northwestern China, my artistic journey began at an early age, with doodles filling every corner of the house. I spent my childhood wandering the dusty hills before moving to the dense cityscapes of Shanghai in 2013. Eventually, in 2018, I found myself in New England, where the gentle, seasonal rhythms of the Northeast introduced a new kind of stillness. While each place marks a distinct chapter in my life, together these transitions deepened my relationship to nature and the environment, which became an enduring drive in my art practice.

The shifting landscapes and my changing relationships with representation have created a sense of duality that runs through much of my work, drawing a tension between naturalistic representation and abstraction, between structural foundations and atmospheric openness, between known and unknowable. Rather than reconciling these dynamics, their friction rejects certainty—inviting the viewer to sit with ambiguity and to feel their way through the in-between.

My recent project, the Yellow River Series, continues inquiry into place, memory, and identity. The series explores the raw, unyielding power of the landscape that shaped my earliest memories: whether it’s the eroded cliffs of the plateau, the silt-heavy Yellow River, or the distant memory of the Xiaolangdi Dam’s thunderous release. I depict places that I haven’t been since childhood, and the process has become a personal journey of return and rediscovery. Through layered, textured brushwork and a palette of earthy, and weathered tones, the paintings treat landscape as a vessel for remembrance and loss—constantly reshaped by time, distance, and imagination. I ask: What does it mean to carry the stories of a land one can no longer touch?

The project continues as I study local waterways and reservoirs. These landscapes offer me a new lens–one that filters memory through presence, and distance through lived experience in New England.