Wang Tiande 王天德

Wang Tiande (b. 1960 in Shanghai) graduated from the Chinese Painting Department of Zhejiang Academy of Fine Arts (now the China Academy of Art) in 1988 and later obtained his doctoral degree from its Department of Calligraphy. He is currently a professor at the Fudan University in Shanghai.

Celebrated for his revolutionary takes on traditional Chinese art in China and abroad, Wang Tiande is best known for his burned landscapes, consisting of a painted underlayer and an overlayer burned with cigarettes or incense sticks. More recently, he has incorporated into the landscapes rubbings of famous ancient steles from his own collection. In their fusion of the fleeting and the timeless, Wang Tiande’s works meditate on creation and destruction. They are both elegies to the past and celebrations of its present persistence.

Wang has had numerous solo and group exhibitions in major galleries and museums worldwide, including Chambers Fine Art, New York (2004), Alisan Fine Art, Hong Kong (2007), Spencer Museum of Art, Kansas (2009), University of Sydney, Australia (2010), Suzhou Museum, Suzhou (2014), Today Art Museum, Beijing (2014), The Palace Museum, Fujian and Beijing (2015), Nanhai Art Center, San Francisco (2016), Guangdong Art Museum, Guangzhou (2017), National Art Museum of China, Beijing (2018), and Suning Museum of Art, Shanghai (2019), among others.

Wang’s work has been collected by the British Museum, London, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Brooklyn Museum, New York, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, The Art Institute of Chicago, Asian Art Museum of San Francisco, UC Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, California, Asian Art Museum of San Francisco, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Montreal Museum of Contemporary Art, Canada, Royal Ontario Museum, Toronto, Canada, Hong Kong Museum of Art, Shanghai Museum of Art, Suzhou Museum, Guangdong Art Museum, Shenzhen Art Museum, and Today Art Museum, Beijing, among many others.