Wang Zhongjie isn't a painter, he's a man who's wholeheartedly seeking the reason for, and meaning, of his life, and he's doing so through what he knows how to do best: painting. Zhongjie did not study at an Academy of Fine Arts, he didn't take part in any of those activities or associations that “those within his field” normally take part in. He has no need to free himself of the stylistic formulas art institutes impart; his hand is free to act upon the canvas governed solely by his mind, which is (relatively speaking) original and unique and whose expression is not hampered by excessive external influences. Yet his rapport with the canvas isn't easy or immediate. It's as if, when faced with an untainted surface, he were face-to-face with the mystery of life itself. The search for an expressive “key,” which he often talks about, does not refer to technical or painterly questions, but to existential ones. That's why each day, as he returns home from his studio, or before going to bed, he asks himself the question: How close have I come to solving that mystery? How much more have I learned about it?

Zhongjie has a visceral, unutterable, indescribable sensibility that drives him in both his life and paintings. His canvases are the strenuously reached, distilled expressions of his intuitions, the painstaking excretions of that sensitive and prolific sensibility. He understands and engages in painting – art - not as an end in itself (on the contrary, he doesn't at all consider it in these terms), but as a key to understanding the essence of existence. It's clear that Zhongjie includes art within the realm of the spirit rather than that of matter, and in this sense all considerations that are not based on purely spiritual questions have no right to be applied.
 - Monica Dematté

Courtesy of OFOTO Gallery