Born in the coastal city of Shandong Province, China, Zixuan Wang graduated in ceramics from the Shandong Academy of Arts in 2018 and went on to study for a master's degree at the Royal College of Art in London.
In the future Zixuan Wang aims to be a freelance artist, working on self-directed subjects and exploring the obsessions of the self and of others.
My focus is to express ideas through the properties of clay material: seemingly hard, fragile, and wounded after breaking, a metaphor for the fragility and power of human emotions. Everyone in life has similar problems: I show these feelings and experiences to help lost people, let them feel understood and supported at the same time; to help them understand the world, emotionally complex and multifaceted, and finally to find a way to realise the power of the heart and of thinking.
This work is a narrative of 'salvation', I use symbols to express people's unease and struggle, in this work I use a shape of clay produced by holding it in my hand. It is then suspended in the air to express the sense of fear and danger we feel in difficult situations. It is also made to act as a bridge to link the emotions of two people, allowing them to support each other to express the pain and perseverance in their relationship. I add glaze to express the traces of tears and the hurt that they bring. I have also used insect cocoons as a metaphor for our bondage and distress and experimented with different materials like twisted newspaper to create new textures to express our struggle in bondage and finally when the insect emerges from the cocoon into a new form it is a sign that we too have broken from our bondage and have redeemed ourselves.
We can make ceramics look soft, although in reality it is hard. It is also fragile and once broken into sharp shards has the potential to hurt others. I think these properties are like our hearts: when we are happy, we are soft - when we are sad, we become hard - at times strong, other times fragile. And when our hearts are broken, like ceramic shards, we can hurt others .
I have used different material properties to make four white ceramic hearts, and used different textures to express different qualities of human emotion. I have developed each ceramic heart modelled from the representation of the human heart, but each one is clearly different. I will distinguish them using the texture of glaze, thickness of glaze, and thickness of ceramic itself.
For this project I am showing mushrooms in combination with winding glass threads to represent people's emotional entanglement. Visiting a glass workshop in China I discovered some results from the hot blowing process that look like a mass of threads and which I thought were very similar to human nerves and mushroom fungi.
When people become emotionally entangled with an object, they become like plants that can't move. I wrap glass threads around a stone.The stone represents something that nourishes our emotions, such as an object or a view that brings back memories and the emotions that grow on the stone become entangled, like fungi, like mushrooms. I want my work to express ideas around unconscious emotion, emotional transmission and love.
