I first saw one of Wo Xinyu’s surrealist paintings at the opening of “A Private Viewing,” a group show presenting one of her oils on canvas, Everything, Every Moment (2022) at Charmoli Ciarmoli—it caught me off guard, intense. A naked woman standing on a protruding ledge atop a house, colors blazing in fiery red and orange. Her hands outstretched, like a diver bracing for a buoyant take-off, in the style of 19th-century depictions of Greek goddesses. It is exhilarating and chilling at the same time. Theodoros Vryzakis’s Grateful Hellas (1858), comes to mind, where Greece is personified in a young woman towering above the revolutionaries who freed her. But, in Wo’s version our female figure towers over what looks like a sleepy Florida-looking backyard. Unlike many surrealist painters whose gestures remain within formal experimentation, Xinyu’s work operates on a mythic register-melding historical references with unsettling domesticity in ways that feel both timeless and culturally specific.
The talented Chinese-born artist works out of Mana Contemporary and her main collaborating gallery is the prestigious VillageOneArt in Chelsea. On the heels of a successful year, marking her third solo show with the gallery, a group show at Pablo’s Birthday, and sales for DWP Cares benefit on Artsy—a platform whose curated auctions often features artists with demonstrably original practices or growing institutional relevance—we caught up on the phone. “As an artist, I do not need to solve problems, I create problems,” Wo tells me. Her surrealist paintings create mind-fucks I think to myself, as she shares her ideas on the shift from factory work to office work, countryside to city, and how computers are de-facto creating a new species.
Wo’s work is populated by towering characters, missing organs, sun and fire worship, lashing tongues, and long shadows in biblical proportions borrowing imagery and style from illuminated manuscripts, traditional Chinese painting, and 20th-century surrealists, but adding contemporary flair. Like emojis. Dance at the End of the Light for instance depicts sexless nude figures dancing around a fire, a hole in their chests where their heart would be—a more sinister version of Henri Matisse’s Dance (I) (1909) on view at the Museum of Modern Art. Where Matisse’s bodies are rhythmic and sensual, Xinyu’s are stiff, ranging, and ritualistic.
Cecilia Alemani’s 59th Venice Biennale The Milk of Dreams brought surrealism, from the point of view of female artists, into the spotlight in a big way—art historians revisited Leonora Carrington’s Milk of Dreams, a storybook with illustrations of a boy with wings for ears and an insufferable crocodile. While living in Mexico, Carrington created stories and drawings for her children, surrealism creating a new language for them to laugh at and ponder reality. Wo comments on her classical training at the China Academy of Fine Art in Guangzhou, “China doesn’t need people with creative ideas.” At the School of Visual Arts, Wo studied with Mika Rottenberg whose surrealist video work explores labor and capital, often reimagining production processes. Like Rottenberg, Wo’s work, is driven by weird ideas, and is tethered to many contemporary hot-topic discussions, AI is one of them. Her ability to synthesize classical training with avant-garde conceptual strategies reflects a level of technical and intellectual command that sets her apart from many of her contemporaries.
In the future she thinks that people who are not creative will be replaced—as AI continues to gain prominence, the creative class will reign. Imagination is an asset. “We are coming up in a new AI generation, creating a new species where humans, nature, and technology meet. Humans make mistakes but AI mistakes are fixable and, unlike humans which are based on emotion and feelings, completely rational,” she continues. “So we romanticize mistakes within this new genre,” which, to me, makes sense. She does not subscribe to doom and gloom predictions claiming that AI technology grows feelings, rises, and ruins humanity driven by revenge. Rather, she thinks, that Her (2013) has come true through AI boyfriends, Amazon Alexa, or more outlandish companion robots, AI technology is a cure for loneliness, woven into our lives. Wo’s work truly sits in the corners of the mind’s eye.
Wo Xinyu will be part of Mana Contemporary’s Open Studios in May. Stay tuned to her Instagram for the exact date.
