Wang Guangle was born in 1976 in Mibei, Fujian province. He graduated from the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing in 2000.
Wang spearheaded a new generation that was dedicated to exploring ‘all possibilities beyond the rules of the Academy’, and to resisting conventional labels such ‘representation’ or ‘abstraction.’ In 2003, he became a founding member of N12, a collective of young artists unified by a desire to break away from the traditions of representational painting in favour of individual expression. His graduation exhibition at the Academy showcased five paintings which had taken him almost half a year to complete. The title of the series, 3pm to 5pm, referred to the period when Wang would paint in his studio, working to capture the rays of light projected across his studio floor by the setting sun. This led to the series Terrazzo, in which he used a composite material consisting of chips of marble, quartz, granite, or glass poured with a binder. He chose to emphasise the painting process itself by focusing solely on the terrazzo and stripping out all other elements.
Wang Guangle’s work is in public collections including the M+ Sigg Collection, Hong Kong; Guy & Myriam Ullens Foundation, Geneva; M+, Museum for Visual Culture, Hong Kong; Sammlung Goetz Collection, Munich; Shanghai Minsheng Art Museum; Vanhaerents Art Collection, Brussels; and the White Rabbit Collection, Sydney. He has been the subject of one-artist exhibitions at Pace Gallery (2019), at Beijing Commune (2009, 2011, 2015) and at the Soka Art Center, Taipei (2011).
His work has been featured in many group exhibitions, including the Prague Biennale (2009); the Busan Biennale (2010) and California-Pacific Triennial, Orange County Museum of Art, Newport Beach (2013). His museum group exhibitions include China’s ReVision: Focus Beijing, Ludwig Museum, Koblenz, Germany (2008); ON | OFF: China’s Young Artists in Concept & Practice, Ullens Center for Contemporary Art, Beijing (2013); 28 Chinese, Asian Art Museum, San Francisco (2015); and Constellation, Dmitry Shevardnadze National Gallery, Tbilisi, Georgia (2017).