Central to the core of Wo Xinyu’s solo exhibition with VillageOneArt, on view May 2023, is the concept of a shared sense of humanity and purpose.

Xinyu’s soft and voluminous figures set within abstracted landscapes question the place of humankind within a larger philosophical context. Softy diffused colors allude to a soft intuition, hinting at the lofty goal of extending consciousness into the realm of painting. These pastels and permeable outlines of figures depicted throughout these works infuse the artist’s oeuvre with a sense of ambiguous narration buoyed by timelessness. As shown in Guardian of Humanity, figures water prone human bodies who seem to grow plants from their centers, offering a moment of reflection on how we foster and nourish qualities within ourselves and what lies attached to our bodies beyond the realm of the physical.

Xinyu reflects on the interrelationships between us as people while dividing the picture plane into orderly, harmonious regions. This careful delineation leads the eye to digest her subject matter evenly, taking in the painting in careful parts to better comprehend the whole composition.

The artist also extends these scenes to encompass the sky, stretching upward into the firmament. Her paintings embrace soft gradients and rounded, organic curvilinear elements rising upward in the space of the picture plane. Xinyu reflects on the symmetries that connect us with the wider world – and universe – that we originate from.

When I look up at the stars, from a physical standpoint, I don't feel any different from them because we are all made up of the same elements.

With the development of civilization, it has become a trend to emphasize "individuality". The pros and cons of this phenomenon for the development of human society are a thought-provoking topic. I often feel that I can not contact with the world, the distance between people is very far. I do not know whether this is the inevitable development of a civilization or the precursor of its destruction. My work revolves around concerns about the spiritual connections between people in the modern world. In my work, I interweave the collective unconscious with my personal history, using surrealism to allude to some worrying social situation.

I am inspired by the images and sounds of people's dreams. People's individual and collective subconscious often appear in their sleep, seemingly unrelated, but actually come from the real thoughts in their daily lives. I like to extract these dream elements, which may be words, images, or sounds, and then combine them with the specific topics I create to create an allegorical visual language that allows the audience to communicate in this surreal dream.

My works are usually in the form of short videos, and I like to tell a story at a certain pace in a way that combines visual language and auditory effects. In these stories, the audience is like a creature in a five-dimensional space. They are watching the stories on different time lines. The audience can choose to view the image works from different angles at different time points and generate different dialogues, which is the charm of video for me.

(Wo Xinyu)