Through Lingering Windows
Artist: Ming Wang
January 11–March 8, 2025
Opening Reception: January 18, 4–8 PM
Ming Wang, At Dawn, 2024. (detail) Oil on canvas, 38 x 50 inches ©Ming Wang, courtesy of Fou Gallery
“I take motifs from daily encounters and see my paintings and prints as emotional containers that preserve unconscious thoughts and fleeting feelings.
I want to fully render the emotions in specific moments in my work and invite the viewer to experience them.”
- Ming Wang
(New York—October 12, 2024) Fou Gallery is delighted to present Through Lingering Windows, the New York debut solo exhibition by artist Ming Wang, on view from January 11 to March 8, 2025. In this exhibition, Wang captures the subtle beauty of everyday life, transforming familiar scenes into contemplative psychological landscapes that explore the intersection of memory, emotion, and the self. Curated by Ashley Ouderkirk—curator, art writer, editor, and artist advisor—the show promises an evocative dialogue between the mundane and the extraordinary.
For most city dwellers, daily life revolves around a familiar routine: rushing from home to work and back, rarely pausing to observe the world around us. For Wang, however, these ordinary moments—walking through familiar streets, parks, or interiors—serve as a foundation for her artistic practice. She draws on her surroundings to craft compositions that delve into our emotional connections to the mundane while seeking deeper meaning.
Originally from Shenzhen, China, and now based in New York, Wang brings an intimate understanding of the routines and landscapes of urban life to her work. Yet, she gravitates toward quiet scenes amidst the chaos, finding inspiration in architectural details, everyday objects, and small, manicured green spaces tucked away in bustling neighborhoods. Each painting is infused with an emotional resonance—loneliness, solitude, comfort, or pride—rooted in the artist’s own reflections on the scene. Wang’s artistic process begins with a photograph, taken during a walk or routine moment near her home or studio. From there, she sketches compositions that merge her mindful observations with the emotions each scene evokes. She frequently shifts details, such as changing a bright blue sky to an overcast gray or removing figures and extraneous elements, to fine-tune the emotional atmosphere. Her paintings are not direct representations but are instead reflections of her emotional relationships to the memories or imagined reinterpretations of them.
Color plays a central role in Wang’s practice, particularly her use of gray and blue. Gray tones convey a sense of heaviness and muted time, while blue—deeply inspired by Rebecca Solnit’s A Field Guide to Getting Lost—evokes longing, distance, and the expansive quality of atmosphere. In Fountain (2024), pale gray skies and deep blue undertones evoke melancholy, with the off-center fountain creating a sense of unease. The delicate streams of water suggest quiet mourning, as though lamenting an unspoken tragedy.
Recurring motifs in Wang’s work, such as shadowy figures and windows, further deepen her exploration of identity and introspection. Shadowy figures, androgynous and undefined, invite viewers to project themselves into the work, shedding identifiers like age, gender, and race. In New Beginning (2023), a shadowy figure stands with arms outstretched beneath a keyhole-shaped archway. The composition conveys a striking duality: the weight of the stone architecture evokes anxiety and enclosure, while the passageway opens toward a bright cerulean sky, symbolizing hope and renewal. Windows, both literal and metaphorical, are central to the exhibition’s title, Through Lingering Windows. Drawing from their rich art historical lineage, Wang uses windows as a lens to examine both the external world and internal emotional landscapes. In Window Spider (2023), viewers peer through a double-arched cloister window into a vibrant blue sky, where birds soar freely. Yet the scene conveys a sense of separation, with the viewer positioned inside, longing for connection. Above the window ledge, a delicate spider descends, symbolizing creation and patience, reflecting Wang’s identification with quiet, persistent creativity.
Through her deeply personal and evocative work, Ming Wang invites viewers to pause and appreciate the poignant beauty of the everyday. Her debut solo exhibition, Through Lingering Windows, explores the fluidity of memory and the emotional depth of the ordinary, offering a quiet yet powerful challenge to engage more mindfully with the world around us.
Curator: Ashley Ouderkirk
*The press release is based on an essay authored by Ashley Ouderkirk.
READ FULL ESSAY (Upcoming)Catalogue
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Artist
Ming Wang (b.1998, Shenzhen, China) earned her B.F.A. from the School of Visual Arts (New York,(2020) and M.F.A. from Columbia University (New York, 2023). Currently, she lives and works in New York. She has been a faculty member at the School of Visual Arts since 2023. Her work has continued to exhibit in China, Europe, and the U.S.A., including A/W Space, Nanjing, China (2023); Storage Gallery, New York (2023); LATITUDE Gallery, New York (2023); Fredric Snitzer Gallery, Miami (2023); Belenius, Stockholm (2023). She was a residency artist at Vermont Studio Center (2024) and won the Robert Blackburn Printmaking Award from Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts, New York (2023), Teaching Assistant Fellowship at Columbia University (2022) and Jack Endewelt Memorial Award, School of Visual Arts (2020). Her work has been published in Arsty, Whitehot Magazine, New American Painting, Neol Magazine, Kunstkritikk, Yitiao, Shenzhen Daily, and other media platforms. In 2025 she held the first solo exhibition in New York at Fou Gallery.
Curator
Ashley Ouderkirk (she/her) is a curator, art writer, editor, and artist advisor based in New York and Los Angeles. With an M. A. in Art History from Hunter College of the City University of New York, her work focuses on rethinking the relationship between art and audience through an inclusive lens. She has curated projects for SPRING/BREAK, ChaShaMa, Art in General, and KUNSTRAUM LLC, where she was the 2022–23 Curator-in-Residence. Her exhibitions have been featured in publications like Hyperallergic and Art Spiel. She currently serves as editor of ART[MEMO] and Friend of the Artist. Ashley is also a board member of Art in Residency, a nonprofit supporting public art in Antelope Valley, California.
