Ming Wang: Through Lingering Windows

Text / Ashley Ouderkirk

January 2025

For most city dwellers, daily life revolves around a familiar routine: rushing from home to work and back, with a few errands dotted in between. We move efficiently, often consumed by our phones, rarely pausing to observe the physical world around us. Yet, it’s in these ordinary, mundane moments—walking through familiar streets, parks, and interiors—that we have the opportunity to release anxieties and cultivate mindfulness. By tuning into simple sensations and noticing the details that surround us, we can develop a deeper appreciation for the small, often overlooked aspects of life.  For New York-based artist Ming Wang, observing and contemplating the mundane provides an ideal foundation for her artistic practice. 

In her debut solo show with Fou Gallery, Ming Wang captures commonplace moments from her daily life, using contemplative compositions to explore our emotional relationships to everyday junctures while seeking deeper meanings. As a New York-based artist originally from Shenzhen, China, Wang is intimately familiar with the routines and landscapes of bustling city life. However, she gravitates toward quiet scenes amongst the chaos, focusing on distinct architectural details, everyday objects, or the small, manicured green spaces tucked away in urban neighborhoods. Each canvas evokes an emotional connection that the artist experienced while contemplating the scene— thoughts of loneliness, solitude, comfort, or pride. Sometimes, Wang alludes to a singular encounter, while at other times, she layers multiple memories of interacting with a space, creating a sense of passing time that shifts and blurs the original recollection. These memories eventually transform into psychological landscapes, imbued with new narratives.

The artist often begins with a reference photograph from a walk or a routine moment near her home or studio. She then sketches compositions that merge her mindful observations of the scene with the emotions it evoked. Wang frequently alters details—shifting a bright blue sky to a more somber, overcast gray, or removing figures and extraneous elements—to fine-tune the emotional narrative.  Delving into the psychological, she contemplates ‘what if’ scenarios. Her paintings are not literal representations of mundane scenes but are instead reflections of her emotional relationship to the memory or imagined reinterpretations of it. By taking creative liberties, such as altering small details of the original experience, Wang examines how these shifts can change the overall atmosphere and emotional reverberance of the scene.  

Color plays a central role in Wang’s practice, particularly gray and blue. Gray tones mute the mood, slow time, and convey a heaviness, while blue—deeply inspired by Rebecca Solnit’s A Field Guide to Getting Lost—evokes distance and longing through its atmospheric resonance. Fountain (2024) is an exquisite example of both hues, with its pale gray sky and deep blue undertones throughout the composition yielding a feel of melancholy. The off-center fountain encourages a sense of unease and distance, feeling just out of our reach. While Its delicate streams of water evoke soft tears, quietly mourning an unspoken tragedy. 

In her formative painting New Beginning  (2023), we peer through a tall, slender keyhole-shaped archway toward a bright cerulean sky and a few tree branches. Thick bricks of stone flank the entryway, angling us toward the passage and converging to coax the eye through. At the bottom, Wang incorporates one of her ‘shadowy figures,’ arms outstretched, touching either side of the entryway. The work’s duality is striking: the architecture’s imposing weight creates a sense of anxiety and enclosure, yet the composition also conveys a protective, secure space. The title reinforces this tension, suggesting both an anxious departure from safety and an embrace of new beginnings.

While Wang’s practice often involves removing people from her compositions, she prefers to rely on ‘shadowy figures.’  These androgynous silhouettes remove identifying qualities such as gender, age, and race, inviting viewers to project themselves into the work. As Wang explains:

“The anonymity of the shadow avatar not only is a safe camouflage but also provides a sense of freedom-free from gravity, and social identities that separate people… “

Another recurring motif in Wang’s work is the window, whether physical or implied. As the exhibition’s title, Through Lingering Windows, suggests, the concept of the window is a central trope. While windows have deep roots in art history—from the Italian Renaissance era to the Dutch Golden Age and even American Social Realism artists like Edward Hopper—Wang uses them not only to define the picture plane but also to encourage viewers to look both outward and inward. In the blue monochromatic work Window Spider (2023), for instance, we peer through a double-arched cloister window from a dimly lit room to a vibrant cerulean sky, where two birds soar, evoking hope and a free-spirited nature. Yet the scene also conveys separation, with the viewer positioned inside, observing and longing from afar. An intriguing detail lies in the delicate spider descending above the window ledge, a metaphor for creation. Its speed, precision, and patience reflect Wang’s own artistic process, while its petite size and often-overlooked work resonate with the artist’s identification with quiet yet persistent creativity.

The strength of Ming Wang’s work lies in her ability to incorporate mindful awareness, finding comfort in the ordinary and using it as a lens to explore memory and her psychological landscape. By amplifying sensations and emotions through objects, hue, nature, shadowy silhouettes, and fragments of recollection, she weaves a nuanced narrative that invites viewers to reflect on the intersections of memory, emotion, and the self.

As a whole, Wang’s practice engages with broader themes that are increasingly relevant in contemporary art: the quiet rebellion of mindfulness in an age of overstimulation, the malleability of memory, and  psychological explorations of everyday spaces that reflect our sense of self. Her focus on windows—both literal and metaphorical—invites a dual reflection, encouraging viewers to investigate their surroundings while simultaneously contemplating their inner emotional worlds. In this way, her work echoes art historical traditions of introspection while carving out a deeply personal and timely response to the complexities of modern life.

As you walk through the exhibition space appreciating each painting’s aesthetic and conceptual depths, we would also encourage you to pause and consider how her reimagined moments speak to the fluidity of memory and the poignancy of the ordinary. Wang opens a space for viewers to reflect on their own connections to place, memory, and self, offering both comfort and a quiet challenge to engage more deeply with the world around them directly Through each of her Lingering Windows.