Interview with: Wanting Wang

August 2025

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Wanting Wang is a Chinese visual artist based in London, working across photography, installation, and digital media. Her work explores themes of order, perception, and emotional structures through surreal interventions into the everyday. Drawing on personal memory and socio-cultural conditioning, she reveals the subtle distortions and hidden violence within systems we take for granted. Wang’s artistic voice blends poetic subversion with conceptual clarity, often reconstructing domestic and familiar objects into quietly unsettling tableaux.

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Welcome Wanting, first tell us about your background and why you chose to pursue this career. Do you remember the first artwork that stirred something inside you?

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I was born and raised in China, in an environment where order was deeply embedded—where objects had functions, behaviors had rules, and emotions were gently folded away. I studied at the University of the Arts London for five years, and it was during this period that I began unlearning what I had internalized. The rigid structures I once saw as stability started to look like curated illusions.

I can’t name a single artwork that sparked everything, but I vividly remember the feeling of confusion and awe when I first encountered works by Sarah Lucas and Mona Hatoum. The domestic was no longer soft or safe—it was charged, strange, and political. That tension stayed with me.

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What inspires you? Where do the ideas come from? How do you develop your projects?

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I’m often inspired by the moments when things go slightly wrong—an object placed in the wrong spot, a routine that suddenly feels absurd, a system that quietly fails. I let these observations ferment until they form images. From there, I build—sometimes with carefully staged photography, sometimes through sculptural intervention. But it always begins with noticing, then disrupting.

 

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When did this passion of yours become your work?

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It didn’t happen all at once. For a long time, art was how I processed the world quietly—without expecting it to become anything more. But during my years at the University of the Arts London, I began to understand that my perspective—this sensitivity to the quiet rules of life, the overlooked details—was not just personal, but political and worth sharing. It was when others started to feel something through my work—discomfort, recognition, reflection—that I realized this could become more than a private practice.

It became work when I stopped making art just to express myself, and started making it to ask questions, disrupt structures, and invite others in.

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How would you describe your artistic practice? What are the recurring elements, themes, and concepts you refer to?

 

My practice revolves around order and its breakdown—especially in domestic, aesthetic, and cultural contexts. I’m interested in rules that shape our bodies, behaviors, and spaces—rules so deeply embedded they go unnoticed. Recurring motifs include tools, furniture, food, and synthetic beauty. I often use surrealism and precise composition to generate a sense of unease. What looks ordinary at first glance begins to unravel upon closer inspection.

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What do you want your art to convey to the people who see it?

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I hope my work makes people pause—and question what they consider “normal.” I want them to feel a quiet tension, to notice the contradiction between surface calm and inner collapse. If someone begins to see their own environment differently after encountering my work, that’s enough.

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We are at the end of this short interview, would you like to add something about your artistic research? How did you find the collaboration with our gallery?

 

I’m currently working on a new series that focuses on failed or deformed organic forms—plants, fruit, flesh—those labeled as “imperfect” or “unfit.” It’s another way of examining aesthetic violence and the hidden structures that shape value and worth. Collaborating with your gallery has been a refreshing process. I appreciate how you create space for personal, experimental voices to reimagine what contemporary European photography can be. Thank you for the invitation.

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