Looks Back, Returns, and Reembarks at Fosun Foundation Chengdu
Exhibition Duration: September 21–December 24, 2025
Opening: September 20, 2025
Venue: Fosun Foundation Chengdu
Chengdu, China: The Wang Jiajia Solo Exhibition “Family Business” will be held at Fosun Foundation Chengdu from September 21 to December 24, 2025, presenting the artist’s important experiments and periodic shifts in the artist's work across three floors of the exhibition space. The exhibition, curated by Sun Wenjie, spans the mediums of painting, sculpture and installation, with mostly new works, including the “Roots” series, begun in 2022, the “Faces” series, which has continued for a decade, and a participatory site-specific installation set in the staircase—part of which has been turned into the social setting of a mahjong parlor, bringing art into a living setting and responding to the leisurely atmosphere and street culture of Chengdu.
The exhibition title “Family Business” is a reference to a mundane conversation the artist once had with his father. As Wang Jiajia began exploring multimedia and experimental techniques, his father asked, “Why can’t you just stick to painting, and do it properly?” As family, heritage, and individual practice become entangled, this “Family Business” serves as the emotional starting point of this exhibition, and an introspective stance toward his practice. In terms of technique, the question of “paint properly” organically integrates Wang Jiajia’s line-based artistic foundation, his writerly brushwork, and his contemporary media experimentation. The first and second floors mainly focus on works from the “Roots” series. The viewer passes between alternating large and small paintings for an up-close experience of the rhythms of the lines and layers of colors. On the narrative level, Sun Wenjie's curatorial approach emphasizes “return” as a thread: Wang Jiajia’s creative path has been a constant cycle of distant journeys and returns—moving to distant London at the age of three and returning to Beijing as an adult, the individual's geographic movement and artistic training weaving into constant revisitations in search of his “roots.”
Wang Jiajia
Tree #100 (Mirage),150 x 200cm, 2025
oil on canvas
Courtesy the Artist and SPURS Galler
Wang Jiajia
Tree #99 (Sun Eater), 150 x 200cm, 2025
oil on canvas
Courtesy the Artist and SPURS Gallery
In the “Roots” series, Wang Jiajia starts each work with a series of line drawing, and in the following process, uses a spatula to cut away the paint that covers them, leaving meandering curves. The resulting image reveals layers of texture and richly dynamic expressiveness: the lines endlessly connect and expand like a neural network, sometimes branching into a dragon in the clouds, or spreading out across the ground as roots, the forms taking on fluidity under the combined interventions of water, lighting, and color. The broad color-gradient brushstrokes that appear in the works hearken back to the “Feibai” style of traditional calligraphy, and “flower-and-bird script” drawings from folk tradition, but with Wang Jiajia, these elements have been translated into a more individualized visual grammar—they flow, turn, spread, and naturally generate. As Sun Wenjie notes in the curator's text, “From early text collages to writing concealed within brushwork, from the conscious selection of readymade images, to destructive opposition for attention in the picture, from appreciating landscape paintings in his childhood to nowadays anti-plein air landscape depictions, the artist has always worked in the fundamental, universal experiences: contexts and connections, family and self, and coming-of-age cultural memories.”
Wang Jiajia
I’m Wild on the Inside, 140 x 140cm, 2025
oil on canvas with spray paint, acrylic, resin, and digital print
Courtesy the Artist and SPURS Gallery
Wang Jiajia
Open Your Eyes, Come and Bite Me, Bite Me, 200 x 300cm, 2025
oil on canvas with spray paint, acrylic, resin, and digital print
Courtesy the Artist and SPURS Gallery
The segment on third floor focuses primarily on the “Faces” series, creating a layered gaze that builds upwards from below, as if completing a visual journey from the interior to the exterior. In fact, the “Faces” series is a continuation and deepening of Wang Jiajia's experimental methodology in the construction and destruction of images. The artist begins with printing, digital reproduction and other such means to construct a almost “perfect” image foundation, then employs painting, scraping, and erasure to cover or expunge the original look of the image, before allowing some “gaze” or remaining line of sight to penetrate the picture, giving the image a sense of time and breath. To this end, the juxtaposition of the “Faces” and “Roots” series formally establishes in the exhibition a perceptual path from interior to exterior, from depths to surface: lines rooted in the body, family memories, and “eyes” from the outside world constantly gazing and concealing come together to form Wang Jiajia’s current creative thread. This exhibition also touches on breakthroughs in material. Wang Jiajia folds 3D printing, metal, stone, resin, and readymade objects into his language of painting. Through volume and texture, the sculpture works respond to the linear tensions in the picture, while the frictions between different textures bring tactile and auditory possibilities to the image beyond the visual. These cross-media practices turn “Family Business” into an onsite discussion of material, craft, and everyday rituals.
The Stairwell Project, set apart by its unusual character, saw Wang Jiajia transform the stairwell into a miniature mahjong parlor, complete with a few tables for live play. In doing so, he drew art out of the white cube and back into the fabric of everyday urban life, distilling the spirit of Chengdu into a participatory practice of interaction and encounter. With the sounds of shuffling and clattering tiles filling the space, art and the public came into intimate, tangible contact.Like the many spatial “returns” in the exhibition, as the viewer crosses through the space, they will repeatedly be asked a simple question: in this day, what does it really mean to “paint properly”? The answer is perhaps not only in the canvas, but also in how we are accompanied by the image, how we encounter ourselves and others anew in the image.
In terms of the broader cultural context, whether you come for the breathing of the “lines,” whether you are drawn in by the mahjong tables ready for play, or whether you come in search of some explanation between the gaze of the “eyes” and the growth of the “roots,” this exhibition provides a journey of emotion and contemplation with numerous points of entry.
About the Artist
Wang Jiajia
Wang Jiajia
courtesy the artist and SPURS Gallery
Photography: Yang Hao
Wang Jiajia (b. 1985, Beijing, China) received his BA Honors degree from Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design in 2008. He now lives and works in Beijing.
Wang Jiajia’s practice is rooted in his early training in traditional Chinese painting. Shaped by a wide range of influences from popular culture—such as animation, video games, music, and internet phenomena—he continually pursues an experimental exploration of the self, using family memory as a point of reference. From the textual collages in his early works to inscriptions embedded within brushstrokes; from the deliberate selection of found images to the disruptive counterpoints of attention across the canvas; from the traveling-in-mind gaze of childhood to landscapes painted without recourse to direct observation—what the artist engages with are the most fundamental and universal of experiences: connections and contexts, home and self, and the cultural memories of growing up.
By integrating digital image collage, gestural strokes, and silkscreen techniques, Wang creates works through a dynamic negotiation between process and outcome. His practice maps a spiritual topography where contemporary elements and classical modes collide, revealing a dense, pluralistic interplay of cultures.
Wang Jiajia’s recent solo exhibitions include “Wang Jiajia: Family Business,” Fosun Foundation, Chengdu (2025);“You Twist, I Twist Too,” TAO ART, Taipei (2024); “Focal Point 3,” Long Story Short NYC, New York (2024); “Electric Disorder,” Andrea Festa Fine Art, Rome (2024); “Endless Summer,” SPURS Gallery, Beijing (2023); “A/S/L,” DE SARTHE Gallery, Hong Kong (2023); “A Tree Cannot Pick Up Its Root,” TANK Shanghai, Project Space, Shanghai (2022); “The Sun Is in My Eyes,” Xiao Museum of Contemporary Art, Rizhao, Shandong (2021); “Elegant, Circular, Timeless,” SPURS Gallery, Beijing (2020); “FOMO: Fear of missing out,” Tao Art Space, Taipei (2020); “Pop the Champagne,” Boers-Li Gallery, Beijing (2018); “Alternate Realities,” de Sarthe Gallery, Beijing (2016). Recent group exhibitions include Nanjing Art Fair International, Nanjing (2025); “Phantasmagoria,” lbf contemporary, London (2024); “Friends in the Arts,” TANK Shanghai, Shanghai (2023); “The Calling of Harsh,” TANK Shanghai, Shanghai (2022); “Apostolic Succession,” SPURS Gallery, Beijing, (2021); “CLEAN,” SPURS Gallery, Beijing (2020); “One if by Land,” Powerlong Art Center, Xiamen (2019), etc.
About the curator
Sun Wenjie
Sun Wenjie
courtesy the artist
Wenjie Sun is a curator. She holds a BA in Arts Administration from the Central Academy of Fine Arts (CAFA) and an MFA in Curating from Goldsmiths College, University of London. Sun was a participant of the International Visitor Leadership Program (IVLP) in 2023.
She joined the Red Brick Art Museum in 2016 and served as the Head of Exhibitions from 2017 to 2023. In this role, she initiated and oversaw various projects involving exhibitions, publications, collections, and external partnerships with diverse institutions and individuals.
Sun was one of the curators of the second Bangkok Art Biennale "Escape Routes" in 2020. She has curated exhibition projects independently for art awards, foundations, museums, galleries, art fairs and other organisations. In addition to promoting the academic publishing of the Red Brick Art Museum, she has been involved in the translation and publication of the Chinese edition of A Companion to Contemporary Art Since 1945 (2021), and she has written for artists such as Christian Jankowski in his catalogue as well as for a number of art publications.
