Glass speaks to the Chinese artist Freya Fang Wang, who immerses herself in the natural world to create swirling layers of colour that appear abstract but have something to say about life and loss
I ARRIVED at the south London studios gasping and wheezing through thick pollen-filled air. I was welcomed by the painter Freya Fang Wang, who met me outside as I locked up my bike. She ushered me in to the converted school buildings and, as with so many studio complexes in the capital, we went up winding staircases, along corridors and through so many double doors that I started to become disorientated.
Odyssey, 160x300cm Diptych (HxW) Acrylic, Acrylic Marker, Oil Pastel, Oil Stick on Canvas 2025
Wang works in a small former office and, unusually for an artist’s studio, it was comfortably warm and, despite the obligatory strip lighting, there was no need of it as the sunlight flooded in. Many artists I know work in studios that feel like refrigerators for most of the year and are plagued by harsh artificial lighting.
“So, Freya, how did it all start?” I asked, sitting on a fold-down chair and opening my laptop. It all started when she began drawing on the wall beside her bed as a small child, not on canvas or even paper Blu-Tacked up, just pencils straight onto the paintwork. She tells me with a laugh that her bed was pushed into the corner, so those lovely blank walls were right next to her head when she lay down – so what was she supposed to do?
That instinct – to respond directly and immediately to her environment – has clearly stayed with her.
Born in Beijing, she grew up surrounded by paints and turpentine. Her father, an oil painter, taught art and so art wasn’t something she stumbled upon or perhaps even consciously chose at first, it was always “just there”.
She trained in a traditional fine art setting at the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing and dutifully spent years practising the technical side, the required life drawing and still life, but never felt it belonged to her. She struggled to find joy in her work and the friction between what was expected of her and what she actually desired to explore built up over time.
Freya Fang Wang
Wang can recall a family trip to South China while studying for her BA in fine art. Rather than painting from observation, en plein air, she began to hold the memory of the place and then to spill it onto the page later, not concentrating on a specific view but capturing the feeling. She wanted to hold the place and to catch the vibrations as she felt them to be.
This quiet shift to abstraction was important and came just before she arrived in London to study at the Royal College of Art. It was an epic move that created enormous distance – not just geographically, but culturally and psychologically. She began to reflect on her identity as a “radical” in China and how in London she felt far more traditional. In using the distance to observe, she found the clarity required to pick out the elements of her cultural legacy that she wished to claim.
The move helped Wang sharpen her sense of what to hold onto and what to leave behind. She felt rooted in the ancient Chinese world much more than in the contemporary. It was around this time that she began to explore Daoism, drawn to the articulations of “invisible powers” that she was experiencing in the art-making process but had struggled to explain. Dao gave her the language and some of the answers.
Avalanche, 175x145cm (HxW) Acrylic, Acrylic Marker, Oil Pastel, Oil Stick on Canvas 2024
Dating back to around 500BC, Daoism, also known as Taoism, centres on harmony with the Dao (“the Way”), the natural order, the path of life, and is associated with the philosopher Lao Tzu. It emphasises ritual, connecting with the natural world through meditation and observation, and living in alignment with people and the planet. Those who follow Daoism strive for balance and peace.
Fang does not directly reference Daoist imagery in her paintings. There are no symbols, no calligraphy. It functions more as a quiet underpinning, a framework, or maybe a temperature gauge; a way of thinking about change, relationship and balance, and the idea that everything is made from the same underlying material. We are not separate, she tells me, everything is linked.
So, that belief has become a working method. Her paintings are built in translucent layers using first acrylic paint, and then oil pastels, oil sticks and acrylic markers. Those first watery layers, thin, like a stain, provide the scaffolding for the marks, the brushstrokes and drawn lines. She uses fluorescent pigments that sit alongside muted, earthy tones and seem to glow on the surface.
Pan, 167.64 x152.4cm (HxW) Acrylic, Acrylic Marker, Oil Pastel, Oil Stick on Canvas 2024
Odyssey, a large diptych recently shown at Tiderip in London, shows off the vivid, immersive movement that her work is characterised by. It feels both cosmic and intimate, drawing the viewer in and up across the three-metre span.
I viewed it sitting on the floor of the Battersea gallery, accepting the invitation to look up and follow the fluid lines and swirls of colour: flame orange, deep cobalt and soft lilacs. This colour is central, but not always symbolic. The colour is the energy she says, and it’s the power that comes from contrasting and contradicting colours that she seeks. There’s a strong sense of transformation and momentum; the title evokes a journey, and there is both an impatient agitation and a peacefulness present on the canvas. It presses outwards and forwards, leaning towards you, inviting you into visual meditation.
I tell Wang this and she nods excitedly, clearly delighted that I’m picking up what she’s putting down. Her paintings are not abstract in a decorative sense, they feel more than that – exploratory, alive and vibrating. She tells me they’re not planned and that each painting surprises her. The diptych might be the only one called Odyssey but she describes the process of making them all as a journey.
In the studio with Freya Fang Wang
She paints several pieces at once, not simply to be more efficient (although, given the drying time required for some of the watery ones, it does help) but because they feed each other. Leant up against the four walls of the studio, they talk to each other as she waits for one to dry.
Some pieces feel like weather systems or soundscapes. Others seem almost bodily. And still others remind me of ceiling frescos, my mind trying to form shapes out of the shapeless. None of them stay still. They shift.
The natural world is a huge influence on her work, so for my mind to conjure up natural scenery isn’t that absurd. She speaks passionately and painfully about the loss that humanity incurred during and following industrialisation, and the fundamental importance of connection and closeness to the natural world.
In this way, she aligns with Daoism, but although she clearly feels deeply about the ways in which humans are harming the natural world, she is quick to release the anguish. She doesn’t moralise. She just paints, slowly, letting the materials lead, and returning time and time again to the questions – what does it mean to be in touch with something you can only feel? To be connected to an outcome that you cannot predict?
Intertwining, 165x125cm (HxW) Acrylic, Acrylic Marker, Oil Pastel, Oil Stick on Canvas 2024
Freya Fang speaks about her paintings as a conversation, not a conclusion. Each painting is a record of process, a place she reached through trial and change. They become like little mirrors and she leaves a part of herself embedded in each one. But that doesn’t mean they’re autobiographical in the conventional sense. She is not setting out to describe anything, let alone herself. She is keen for me to know that it’s not self-expression, it’s more like self-tracing; a way of following something half felt and watching what comes to meet it.
At the time we meet, she is preparing several pieces: some to go to Taiwan, China, parts of Europe, and some to stay in her new home, London. Despite listing the deadlines to me in a single breath, there is no sense of rush. The studio is quiet, canvases at various stages, some dense with mark making, other left open. She moves between them, gestural in her sweeping movements and enjoying bursts of energy.
She’s not forcing anything, she listens and follows.
by Phoebe Minson