Fan Di’an 

Curator, Former Director of CAFA

Undoubtedly, the concept is a factor of special importance to today’s painters. Paintings without concepts will only leave an empty shell of mediocrity. However, the acquisition of concepts should not be a forced embodiment or a rigid one, otherwise it would be superficial. This series of Xiong Wenyun’s paintings are highly conceptual: she is both constantly excited by the orderly movement of life and puzzled by the fact that homogeneous organisms are always in a state of division. What she wants to express is the concept of contradiction and unity as one. Strictly speaking, her paintings are a single painting, which is only interesting when presented as a whole, and are the carrier of a concept.

                                                                                                  ——Extracted from Fan Di’an’s “Concept & Story: The Duality of Xiong Wenyun’s Drawing Texts” 1998 

 

Fang Lei

Art Critic, Former Director of Songzhuang Art Museum

Kongkong is a young mind – pure, energetic, naughty an and mischievous. Xiong Wenyun continued to use the colors of the rainbow to give them character.  She replaces Kongkong with herself, with endless talking——daily, trivial and essential. Kongkong is after all a life. Xiong Wenyun calms herself in endless asking and practice.

                                                                                                                      ——Extracted from FANG Lei’s “Rainbow and Kongkong: Life Stories of Xiong Wenyun” 2014

 

Feng Boyi

Curator, Art Critic

The art education plan and display of Xiong Wenyun are in response to our the current state of our art education. She has studied the materials of art education domestically and internationally,  combined with her own art practice of years, and, at the same time, she absorbed the advantages of art education materials in Korea, Japan, Taiwan, Europe and America, to make a series of art education plans for preschool children: a teaching program that guides the child to draw and make his or her own picture book of a story as the central clue, and at the same time organically combines the learning of various drawing methods and techniques into the teaching process.

                                                 ——Excerpted from FENG Boyi’s “Another Lesson: A Beneficial Experiment in Children’s Independent Creation and Operation” 2006

 

Jia Fangzhou

Curator, Art Critic

Speaking of the drawing skills, Xiong Wenyun has developed her own method and style after she fully absorbed the characteristics of Tibetan Buddhist mural paintings, and the modern Japanese paintings that attach great importance to colors and materials She has formed a set of own fabrication method and the style. Her works are variegated, harmonious, rich ih and heavy. She provided a reference to transformation in materials and fabrications of traditional Chinese fine brushwork paintings with intense color and also delivered a worthy topic for us.However, there is s a drawback that the works feel simplified inevitably, as a result of pursuing simple and artless modeling.

                                                                                                                                                   ——Extracted from Jia Fangshou’s “Xiong Wenyun and Her Paintings” 1996

 

Karen Smith

Curator, Art Critic

With the Flowing Rainbow, Xiong Wenyun took this palette of glorious colour to Tibet in what was conceived less as a specific act of art, than as an act of charity, supplication and, as some commentators have described, of pure humanity. Her goal was to brighten the lives of communities that she had encountered herself as a bright young teenager back in the 1970s. In effect, with the approach and form that The Flowing Rainbow took, Xiong Wenyun was like a Pied Piper moving along the highway towards the Tibetan plateau, capturing the attention of all who saw her. Her calling card was not the alluring notes of a flute, but the almost magical power of those pure blocks of colour that she draped over doorways, over trucks and, on occasion, daubed on random surfaces.

                                                                                                                                                                            ——Extracted from Karen Smith’s “Director’s Foreword”  2019

 

Li Xianting

Curator, Art Critic

I have said that art is not the most important, by which l mean judging an artwork to be fine or poor depend s a lot on the standards you use. In different language systems, value systems are different. This is not only about learning painting, but also about sharing the entire aesthetic interest with everyone through a very simple process.

                                                                                  ——Extracted from LI Xianting’s “All Roods to Rome -The Dialogue between Li Xianting and Xiong Wenyun” 2014

 

Liao Wen

Curator, Art Critic

The life of “Kongkong” is continuous —  from pregnancy to birth to growth, closely bound up to the changes of the artist in the daily life and the entanglement of her personal psychological experience. Moreover Kongkong is still “growing.” “Kongkong” has comprehensive “language form” — from the traditional painting to the contemporary concepts, to photo, performance and installation, to the most fashionable animation, to the most ancient datura illustration, to the utmost paired up patterns, to the most feminine handicraft labor. 

                                                                                                             ——Extracted from Liao Wen’s “Understanding Kongkong: Another Way of Self-Realisation” 2009

 

Lv Peng

Curator, Art Critic

Xiong Wenyun began by simply painting a figure, but, even if it was a small Tibetan item, she was able to derive from figuration. It was not until she put the abstract color stripes into the exhibition hall that she finally realized that her art should express the spiritual connotations revealed or hinted at in the Tibetan clothing and its complex cultural elements. Xiong Wenyun instinctively recognized the importance of such meanings, which is why she dared to venture into deserted places alone to feel the power of nature and combined the power of nature with her own understanding of life, integrating the colors with rocks, wood, curtains and things people utilize in daily life to convey inner messages.

                                                                                                      ——Extracted from Lv Peng ‘s “The Flowing Rainbow: The Artistic Experience of Xiong Wenyun” 2014

 

Monica Dematte

Curator, Art Critic

In this book written for you, Ms. Xiong teaches you to bypass the obstacles that keep many people away. Like the great Japanese artist Katsushika Hokusai, who wrote many painting textbooks, Ms. Xiong is convinced that each of us can be successful, and that after decades of experience and experimentation, Ms. Xiong understands that it’s not the “technique” that makes an artwork appealing, but its specialness and its individuality.

                                                                                                                                         ——Excerpted from Monica Dematte’s “Draw a World Completely Your Own” 2017

 

TOSHIO Shimizu

Curator, Art Critic

Human beings treat themselves as the products of nature, and at the same time construct their own existence through their efforts to transcend nature. Xiong Wenyun’s works reveal the order hidden behind nature and show it to people. Through her performance art, Tibetan houses, people, life, mountains, valleys, grasslands, rocks……all become artificial landscapes. In short, everything has been incorporated into human rationality and sensibility.

                                                                                                                                                       ——Excerpted from TOSHIO Shimizu’s “The Colors of the Universe” 2002

 

Art Critic

The West (of China) and the East (Japan), neither of them is de facto her own cultural environment, though extremely differentiated from each other, have become the two essential keys in her creative process. I myself would assume that she would work very hard and always ruminating on these two remotely related places, but she is also very diligent and determined so much so that she would delve deeper into those cultures that are absolutely disparate. Xiong Wenyun’s vigorous endeavor and resolution that permeate through the works form the style of her paintings.

                                                                                                                                                           ——Extracted from Shui Tianzhong’s “From the West to the East” 1996

 

Shi Yuling

Art Critic, Curator

As an artist and art educator, Xiong Wenyun has never been an inscrutable thinker, nor is she an ideological warrior or a clever and agile game player. She is more like a missionary full of universal values, creating and spreading art with a selfless gesture.

                                                                                                      ——Extracted from Shi Yuling’s “’Rainbow’ and ‘Displacement’: Interpreting Xiong Wenyun’s Art” 2019

 

Wang Mengmeng

Professor, Curator

Xiong Wenyun’s art has always been inseparable from social communication and in dialogue with ordinary people. In China, where art sociology has not yet become popular, she has created a bridge between society and art with her own efforts, reflecting the value of art to society.                                                                                                                                                                                                         ——Extracted from Wang Mengmeng’s “Preface to A thousand Rainbow” 2019

 

Yi Dan

Professor, School of Literature and Journalism, Sichuan University, Art Critic

Xiong Wenyun separates these action guidance symbols from daily life and reassembles and presents them on the paintings, letting them forming a set of constitutive relationships that are far away from daily contexts. To the left or right, to move forward and stop, no longer perform daily functions,  point to daily meanings, but only form mutual relationships between shapes, compositions, colors, textures, etc. In one sentence: they form the so-called relationship of artistic aesthetics. This relationship, in its usual artistic significance and value dimensions, coincides with the traditional laws of abstract painting.                                

                                                                                                                                                                                    ——Excerpted from Yi Dan’s “Concrete Abstraction” 2021

 

Yu Yue

Professor, Philosophy Department, Sichuan University, Art Critic

The arrow in the hospital hallway has become a turning point between the brand new world and the passing world. Its ethereal but practical indicative function introduces Xiong Wenyun into the questioning state of life and contemporary art. Its image is placed in the intersection of the documentation section and thematic section of the “Recover” exhibition. Starting from here, a new mandala has begun to form, far beyond the scope of the so-called “pandemic art”. Life politics, differences and repetition, thinking and orientation in history, they have become a performance as grand as Faust.

                                                                                                                                                                   ——Excerpted from Yu Yue’s “Exhibition Preface of Re-cover” 2021

 

Zhang Li

Art Critic, Curator

As a prolific and active female artist with 30 years of practice, Xiong Wenyun has taken a unique approach to the field of contemporary art, with her works spanning a wide range of forms and forming her own system. She is good at combining the externalized expression of her personal emotions with the social and humanistic environment, starting from the most original personal feelings and forming and ingenious form and unique language. These works are not confined to the exhibition hall, but appeal to a wider audience in the wider space, while maintaining a very pure and direct force.

                                                                                                                                                      ——Extracted from Zhang Li ‘s “Ten Years of the Flowing Rainbow” 2008

 

Zhang Yi

Professor, School of Literature and Journalism, Sichuan University, Curator

Xiong Wenyun’s arrows lingers between abstraction and figuration. She does not rush to reach a certain transcendental concept, nor does she urgently delete sensual details and impressions. Instead, she maintains enough patience to allow the arrows to gradually generate freely. Afterwards, the arrows break through the singular portrait narrative and unfolds her contemplation of the constantly resetting world and life patterns after 2020 through fable-like quasi-narratives.

                                                                                                                                               ——Extracted from Zhang Yi ‘s “The Hidden Theatre of ‘Re-Cover’” 2021

 

Professor at University of Tsukuba, President of the Basic Art Design Association of Japan

Looking at these works, some people simply regard them as “abstract painting,” while others believe they are “graphic design” that only perform the function of ornamentation. However, these types of opinions are biased. The works of Xiong Wenyun are an eruption after years of painstaking research, a kind of revolution, and revolutionary and pure “fine art” envisioning the modern the spirit. Neither design nor art, they are pioneering objects of “fine art.”

                                                                                                                                   ——Extracted from ASAKURA Naomi’s “Perceiving the Future Spirit of Fine Art” 1997