Wang Hailin, born in 1988 in Ningbo, Zhejiang, China. She studied at the Sichuan Fine Arts Institute from 2007 to 2011, earning a Bachelor’s degree in Oil Painting. From 2012 to 2017, she studied at the State Academy of Fine Arts Karlsruhe in Germany, receiving a Master’s degree. In 2017–2018, she completed her master student studies under Professor Marijke van Warmerdam.
Wang Hailin’s work integrates the tradition of Chinese landscape painting with European painting traditions, emphasizing mood and atmosphere over naturalistic representation. She often employs blue, green, and yellow tones, reminiscent of the Tang dynasty “blue-and-green” style. Since 2015, she has mixed oil and acrylic paints, using their incompatible properties to create flowing, ink-like effects. Her paintings visualize memory and imagination, using color, light, and unconventional perspectives to evoke poetic scenes that feel both familiar and estranged, conveying the idea that “fairy tales can be true and an idyllic life is possible.”
Wang Hailin has held solo exhibitions including: "Paradise" at Zhiye Art Space in Hangzhou, China (2023), "Traumhaft" at Galerie Scheune Nordheim in Heilbronn, Germany (2020), and "Sehnsucht nach Mehr" at ARTWORKROOM Gallery in Landau, Germany (2018). She has also participated in selected group exhibitions such as "As You Encounter" at the Shenzhen Metro Art Festival in Shenzhen, China (2024), the "25th Karlsruhe Artists’ Fair" at Stadtgalerie Karlsruhe in Karlsruhe, Germany (2022), and "Selective Perception (Three-Person Exhibition)" at Schwerpunkt Gallery in Stuttgart, Germany (2021).
Wang Hailin - Artist Interview
Introduction
On the second floor of the old villa in Wuxiang Court in Shanghai, Wang Hailin's residency work quietly took shape. Sunlight filtered through the old windows, casting a reflection on her precise brushstrokes and subtle color layers. The winter branches outside the window and the flowing light and shadow of Wuxiang Road combined to form the background of the picture; while the canvas inside the room recorded the "returning person" recalibrating the scale of perception.
Hailin's artistic language is calm and profound. She does not directly depict the hustle and bustle in the distance or the prosperity before her eyes. Instead, by gazing and transforming the fragments captured in the cultural "gap", she turns the grand narrative into an inner emotional landscape. For her, painting is a dynamic process that allows for hesitation, layering, and correction. Time gradually condenses into texture within the brushstrokes.
After a six-year absence from her home country, Helin regarded this stay as a "re-adjustment". The pace of the city and the density of information made her experience a genuine "cultural dislocation". She did not set a specific theme in advance; instead, she allowed the brushstrokes to naturally emerge from this suspended, somewhat perplexed scene.
Let's follow her brushstrokes, starting from the memories of Ningbo, passing through the turpentine scent of the Karlsruhe studio, and arriving at this old villa immersed in the winter light and shadow of Shanghai. We will explore how an artist gradually builds their own unique language through continuous dialogues with information, memories, and distance. This dialogue traverses the inside and the outside - about how she internalizes "corners of the world" into the breathing of the picture, the quiet response to "watching others' pain"; it also concerns this returning city of Shanghai, the new shades it blends in its palette, and the profound traces formed by the interweaving of reason and emotion when concentrating in front of the canvas.
1. First of all, could you please introduce the creative theme of this residency program at the Shilu Picture Gallery in Shanghai, and explain how this "return" experience specifically became the starting point for your creative work?
Wang Hailin: This stay was a kind of "re-adjustment". After six years away, when I returned to Shanghai, I was enveloped by a strong sense of dislocation. Everything became fast, dense and numerous, and the familiar rhythm vanished completely. This uncomfortable yet real state became the starting point of my creation. I didn't set a predetermined theme; instead, I started from the feeling of "returning to the scene". Many of the images were pushed out by this sense of strangeness. I wanted to use painting to record the moments of re-facing this city - confusion, pauses, blurriness or the feeling of being pushed along. The working method was also more open; there were no plans, and the works emerged naturally based on daily experiences. What I painted was not "returning", but how to gradually re-adjust and regain one's perception rhythm.
2. Your artistic style combines both realism and abstraction, moving between recognizable scenes and the blurry boundaries of emotions. How would you describe your unique artistic language to viewers who are not familiar with your works?
Wang Hailin: I prefer the state of "being both like and unlike". It stems from the genuine emotions in life: standing in a familiar place, yet feeling distance, strangeness, and blur. This sense of clarity and ambiguity resonates with my recent state of constantly adapting to different cultures. I don't draw these to create mystery, but rather because some experiences and emotions simply cannot be fixed - they are elusive, changing, and swaying in the mind. I hope that viewers, in front of my paintings, can temporarily enter this state: there's no need to rush to understand or find answers; instead, simply feel that slow, light, and uncertain breath.
3. You mentioned that this creation does not rely on clear narration, but rather focuses on experiences such as "psychological distance" and "cultural dislocation". As a visual medium, how does painting help you capture and express these intangible psychological states?
Wang Hailin: Painting is dynamic. During the creative process, my emotions keep changing. Every stroke and every layer may trigger different feelings, and even the next second could completely overturn them. The beauty of painting lies in its ability to accommodate all these changes. It doesn't require me to determine my identity in an instant; instead, it allows multiple states to coexist in the same picture. The shadow of the previous thought interweaves with the subsequent changes, and these layers of overlapping, hesitation, overturning and repetition constitute the internal time of the painting. I like this elongated sense of time - it's not like photography that freezes a moment, but accompanies me through the changes and retains those unstable, wavering and even contradictory elements. This is precisely the freedom that painting gives me.
4. "Local observation" is a core method in your creative process. How do you select these "local" elements? In your opinion, why can a tiny detail convey such rich emotions and a broad narrative?
Wang Hailin: These "local" elements are closely related to the daily lives of ordinary people. We often fail to see the overall picture, but precisely in these tiny details, some sensitive points, emotions or atmospheres that we usually don't notice will emerge. What I paint is not the local elements themselves, but the moment when these tiny details touch me. That is the "switch" that marks the beginning of my creation. It can more truly reflect an individual's emotions and feelings than the so-called "main body".
5. In the "Corner of the World" series, you dealt with images of disasters and conflicts from all over the world, but you did not directly depict the events themselves. What were your thoughts behind this creative choice of maintaining a "distant observation" and transforming it into personal emotional images?
Wang Hailin: I don't directly depict war because I wasn't a participant. Re-enacting the scenes would make me feel distorted. But I can't avoid being influenced. Living in Germany, bombarded every day by conflict images on the news and social media, they accumulate in my mind as an unorganized collection, bringing continuous psychological stress. Therefore, what I draw is not "the event", but the emotional traces left after the long-term bombardment of these images. This distant, non-narrative approach is more in line with my honest state as an observer. Since I'm not at the scene, I don't pretend to be there. I only respond with what I can touch. "Distance" is my true position: affected yet far away. I can only start from those fragmented, marginal, yet constantly jostling things in my mind.
6. You once mentioned that Susan Sontag's "On Looking at Other People's Pain" had inspired you. Which viewpoints in this book resonated with your own work, and how did they influence your approach to depicting images of distant suffering?
Wang Hailin: What most touched me about Sontag was her candid revelation of the awkwardness, contradiction, and moral unease when observing others' suffering. She pointed out that images were once regarded as a record of the truth, but now they can be manipulated and no longer necessarily "close to the truth". This made me reflect: The disaster photos I see every day, are they presenting the scene itself, or some kind of narrative? But the deeper impact came from her discussion of the "observer's position" - the observer can never truly enter into the pain of others. This made me both ashamed and powerless. I am not the person involved, yet I "watch" these fabricated images of pain every day. That kind of distant concern and slight discomfort in the act of observing makes me feel deeply uneasy. This directly influenced my creation. I won't draw the most dramatic scenes, because that would make me feel like I'm speaking for or reproducing an unqualified pain. I choose more marginal details: a broken wall piece, a charred stick, a shadow. These tiny things are the "parts I can touch", and also the most honest position as an observer.
Sontag's inspiration is not to tell me what to draw, but to make me realize: I cannot pretend to be closer to the truth than I actually am. I can only draw "that one point that I am touched by from a distance". My painting method has grown out of this incomplete, uncertain, and even slightly ashamed observation.
7. In your works, there is often a "delay" and "hesitation" in the viewing experience. Did you intentionally create this rhythm in the images? What do you hope this viewing experience will bring to the audience?
Wang Hailin: This "delay" and "hesitation" is not deliberately designed; it is the most natural rhythm during my creative process. My painting is linear, evolving and adjusting gradually over time. I have always been somewhat hesitant in observing the world, so the blurriness, pauses, and the slightly delayed movements in the paintings are my true way of viewing. I hope that viewers can also enter this rhythm: at first, they can't see clearly, they want to approach but are gently pushed away, and then they need to gradually find their way.
8. Between your earlier "Thoughts and Records" series and your recent "The Corner of the World" series, we observe a shift from introspective, random emotional records to a greater concern for the broader external world. What do you think is the continuity and evolution involved in this transition?
Wang Hailin: In the early days, I mainly depicted the inner world, as if I was recording "the voice in my heart". But in recent years, the geopolitical conflicts in Europe have profoundly affected the ordinary people here. Even if they are not on the battlefield, the impact still permeates in the minutiae - soaring prices, unstable energy supply, forced changes in habits, ubiquitous huge uncertainties. This made me realize: I once thought I could immerse myself in my own world, but the outside world has been shaping me all the time. Many of the "personal emotions" I thought I had were actually triggered by the constantly emerging news and reality.
Therefore, "The Corner of the World" is a turning point. I first admitted: not only was I observing the world, but the world was also shaping me. I gradually shifted from pure introspection to focusing on the outside - those realities closely related to my life but coming from afar. What I am painting now is not only "my own emotions", but also the reactions of these external events within me.
9. You have lived in two different cultural contexts, China and Germany, for a long time. This "intermediate" state has it seems shaped a unique and personal perspective for you to observe things? What exactly is it like?
Wang Hailin: This "sandwich perspective" enables me to keenly perceive the rhythm differences between the two cultures: one is the highly industrialized and orderly system, and the other is the rapid flow within compressed modernization. It's like a person always standing on the threshold, neither belonging to this nor completely belonging to that. This "floating sensation" once made me uneasy, but later I discovered that it gave me a special perspective: I could see the structure behind the things that others take for granted. The more I painted, the more I realized that this intermediate state is precisely where my strength lies.
10. After returning to Shanghai from Germany, this shift in geographical and cultural space has brought about what specific changes to your "perception toolkit" as an artist - such as your sensitivity to colors, light, and the rhythm of space?
Wang Hailin: Shanghai has made me deeply aware of the extremely high information density. Its fast pace has led me to lean more towards an "oppressive" expression when judging colors, shapes, and the structure of the picture. I began to pay more attention to the density of the rhythm in the picture, the visual impact, and the sense of compression in space. This is in sharp contrast to the stability and softness of Germany.
11. In your proposal for your stay, you hope to establish an "open painting working method". How is this "openness" manifested in the specific creative process? How do you accept and utilize the accidental factors that occur during the creation?
Wang Hailin: The openness lies in not setting limits on the process: I allow materials, accidents and mistakes to participate in the composition of the picture, making the organizational structure closer to the psychological rhythm rather than a pre-determined plan. This approach gives the image uncertainty and generativity, maintaining the flexibility and vitality of the creation.
12. Looking back on your creative journey, from the University of California, San Diego to the Carlsbad Academy of Fine Arts in Germany, how did the different artistic education backgrounds in the East and the West respectively shape your artistic concepts?
Wang Hailin: The art education in China and Germany provided me with different nourishments. The training in China helped me develop a solid foundation in "handwork", focusing on basics, form, and color, which is the basis of my creative work. When I arrived in Germany, my creative approach underwent significant changes. There, more emphasis was placed on thinking: Why do you paint? What is the underlying logic? Has your concept formed a closed loop? The teachers didn't teach "how to paint", but rather asked: What do you want to discuss? How do you view the world? Is your painting speaking its own language?
The German education gave me a forward-looking narrative style, aiming to find one's own system rather than repeating a certain style. Therefore, these two experiences complement each other perfectly: I established a structure and techniques in China, and in Germany, I learned how to transform them into personal thinking and expression methods.
13. Your works often contain profound memories and issues beneath their serene scenes. In different regions, do viewers pay more attention to the aesthetic form, or can they perceive the emotions and ideological aspects beneath the pictures? What are the feedbacks that have left a deep impression on you? For the viewers who will see your new works soon, what do you most hope to convey? When people leave, what do you hope they take away?
Wang Hailin: Viewers are often initially drawn in by the form - the colors, the structure, the atmosphere, these are the intuitive elements. But what truly makes me feel "seen" is when they understand the story behind the work and the creative motivation. At that moment, the picture opens up a new space in their minds. They bring in their own experiences and re-examine the work, and this connection makes me feel precious. Someone told me that a certain structure reminded them of a memory, or a certain atmosphere triggered a certain emotion from the past.
This is precisely the most fascinating aspect of art - viewers do not passively "accept" the narrative, but rather find their own outlet within the structure I have established, fill it with their own stories, and become new footnotes. This two-way reading is my favorite and most anticipated way of watching.