Bio
Wanhang Chao is an artist and a curator currently based in New York. Born in Tianjin, China in 1999, she grew up learning basic techniques in sketching, watercolor, and traditional Chinese painting. Later, as an Economics student at Shanghai University of Finance and Economics(SUFE), she embraced digital art, the most efficient medium for her then, to explore “another reality” — visions present in the mind yet invisible in the physical world. Her works in digital painting intuitively created metaphorical spaces with female characters, representing uncanny intimate perceptions under pressured kinship. They challenged the dominant materialistic notions and the rationalist education system in her cultural environment, and positioned consciousness as a component of reality.
Her graduate studies in Curatorial Practice at the School of Visual Arts (SVA) in New York gave her places to engage with concepts such as surrealism, animism, feminism, and phenomenology. In her thesis exhibition, she was inspired by “She Unnames Them” by Ursula K. Le Guin, telling a fictional story of animals of the world having their names removed, reflecting relationships without given labels, and attempting to reinterpret and express traditional narratives through the female lens.
She is currently continuing her art-creation and curation in New York and towards a global lens.