Wang Tianxuan is an artist who feels strongly about life; for him, art is the carrier of his interpretation of life. He transforms his understanding of the objective material world into his personal landscape of ethos, a mysterious, absurd and obscure world which reflects inescapable genuineness.

“The artists took a self-conscious approach to the past and was meticulous in classifying earlier styles”. Gao Juhan defines it as “art history style painting”. In Wang Tianxuan’s work, in particular the recent series “Qi Xie Mountain Lore”, features of this style is more manifest. The employment of certain elements of traditional landscape painting (giant precipitous mountains, or Ju Zhang)，narration through deity and demon images, and his unique spatial formation technique have presented two clear lines of heritage......

Wang Tianxuan’s “Mountain Lore” inherits the pedigree of traditional tales of oddity. While depicting strange images, his work often presents the metaphor for flesh and body. Human body has never been an object of depiction since landscape painting (originated in Northern Song) was directly propelled by Neo-Confucianism which stresses idealist philosophy.

In the Taoist notion, nature itself is a body. As the artist says himself, his mountain is itself a life. Although just like Christianity, Buddhism curbs evil and advocates good, and does not avoid the existence of human body like Confucianism. Buddhist practice emphasizes confronting human nature head-on and lifting the spirit through physical cultivation.Human body represents desire. The absence and repression of body in traditional Chinese culture is an oppression of desire and human nature. In direct opposition to human nature is morality.

The strange images of flesh and demons in the artist’s work all point to the image of human body. In his wild and weird landscape paintings, Wang Tianxuan, in his own expression, seeks to present a scene of doomsday following the destruction of a civilization, and a metaphor for the coexistence of different human natures following the collapse of morality.

- Dong Dawei, The Double Lineage in Wang Tianxuan’s Paintings