Wang Chuan was born in Chengdu, Sichuan Province in 1953 and now lives and works in Beijing, Shenzhen, and New York. Wang is a key figure in the Scar Painting movement.
He began his early career as a successful realist painter and turned to abstract painting during the ’85 New Wave period. In the late 1990s, sudden illness brought Wang Chuan to a turning point that led to a dramatic transformation in his artistic style. His recent work contains hidden energy potential that provides people with an experience akin to spiritual exploration through contrasts of scale, reality and illusion, thickness, as well as points, lines and planes. This introspective and self-reflective way of working emerged from personal setbacks but has unexpectedly enabled Wang Chuan to achieve new insights, especially through his contemplation of oriental philosophy, which cannot be obtained from art history alone.