Joanne Wang

The Art of Joanne Wang
by Alfred Corn
Central to Chinese cultural tradition is the art of poetry. Painting was not at first regarded as an important and significant practice in China’s early history. When visual artists with serious ambitions began to appear, they sought to lend legitimacy to their paintings by including poems as part of the whole, inscribing classic texts in empty parts of the picture space.
Meanwhile, writing itself moved from a mere convenience for conveying and preserving messages and texts toward a new form of visual art, what has come to be called “calligraphy.” The Greek origin of the word means “beautiful writing.” In Chinese it is called shu fa (书法) or “the method for writing”. It's a term which doesn’t suggest calligraphy’s artistic potential. Calligraphy as an art was pioneered and brought to special prominence during the Jin dynasty by Wang Xizhi (303–361). Joanne Wang has demonstrated that calligraphy is not a closed shop and that a woman artist can excel in it. The fluidity, spontaneity, vitality that is expected in good calligraphy is abundant in her work. Though she uses the same style of calligraphy as her ancestor, the xing shu (“walking” or “running”) script, it is inflected by her own a...

A self-taught artist.

Solo art exhibition at 456 Gallery, Soho, New York, in August, 2016;
Exhibited in an International Photography exhibition in NYC, Oct. 2016
Participated in HopArts, Rhode Island, Oct. 2016