Wanting Wang: Art Photography at the Threshold of Order and Collapse

Wanting Wang’s photographic practice operates at the threshold of contradiction. Her work juxtaposes elements with an oppositional quality: the fresh and the rotting, the visible and the hidden, order and collapse. Rather than seeking harmony or reconciliation, she emphasises what she calls ‘friction’—a term that captures both the tension between disparate elements and their necessary proximity. This is not photography that resolves; it is photography that resists, creating what the artist describes as “perceptual tensions that open poetic, uneasy sites for rethinking what it means to be seen, to be embodied.”

The influence of Sarah Lucas and Mona Hatoum hovers over Wang’s visual language, though the connection is conceptual rather than stylistic. Both artists transformed domestic objects into sites of strangeness and political charge, a quality that resonated deeply with Wang when she first encountered their work during her studies at the University of the Arts London. Reflecting on that encounter, she recalls, “The domestic was no longer soft or safe, it was charged, strange, and political. That tension stayed with me.” This awakening manifests throughout her practice, where familiar objects and environments are rendered unsettling through careful displacement and visual intervention.

Wanting Wang, “Blossoms of Decay” series, 2025, digital giclée printing, 42 x 54.9 cm each (framed)

Wanting Wang, “Above The Rules”, 2025, digital giclée printing, 29,7 x 42 cm (framed)

Wang’s understanding of ambiguity and paradox is rooted in her background. Born and raised in China, she describes an environment “where order was deeply embedded—where objects had functions, behaviors had rules, and emotions were gently folded away.” Her five years studying in London became a period of unlearning, where “the rigid structures I once saw as stability started to look like curated illusions.” This biographical thread runs through her work with quiet insistence, particularly in her series Above the Rules, which stages what she terms “premeditated chaos” within everyday domestic settings. Food, furniture, tools and body-related items are arranged to reveal subtle tensions of displacement and absurdity. The structures we depend upon are shown to be perpetually on the verge of collapse or deviation.

Blossoms of Decay pushes this investigation further, juxtaposing rotting fruit with blooming flowers to challenge conventional ideals of beauty and vitality. Here, Wang reveals what might be called aesthetic violence, the hidden criteria that determine which organic forms are deemed worthy and which are discarded. The work asks us to reconsider our investment in perfection, to see decay not as failure but as another state of being, equally present and equally valid.

Her series Liquid Confessions takes a different approach, capturing bodies submerged in water where perception itself becomes fragmented. The choppy surface of the pool disrupts our ability to see clearly, breaking human forms into a kaleidoscopic mosaic. Wang questions the reliability of vision: what we assume to be a unified whole is revealed as partial, interrupted, constantly shifting. Which is more authentic, the totality we imagine or the fractured experience we actually perceive? In this work, the body becomes both subject and question, its boundaries dissolved by the very medium meant to reveal it.

Power, as Michel Foucault understood it, strengthens the bonds of place and meaning that create order under tension. The concept recalls tensegrity, where a structure maintains itself through internal forces: an object held against itself. We perceive this balance through the places where limits fragment. In Wang’s work, the tension exists between the apparent naturalness of her photographs and the deliberate process beneath them. That process remains elusive in her artistic statements, which often favour the mysterious over the explicit. Fragmented perception, the complexities of order, conscious structures of recognition and logic: these concepts appear throughout her writing, yet they have become relatively common currency in contemporary practice. Artists like Paul Sietsema tackle the memetics of reality itself, while Matt Saunders uses photography to materialise time and presence along uncertain boundaries. Both challenge the material limits of their medium. Where, then, do those borders exist for Wang?

A current generation of artists including Charmaine Poh and Gabi Dao employ photography or moving images as the foundation for artistic narrative. Wang aligns with her contemporaries in prioritising the process of perception over the materiality of image making itself. What matters is the play of perceptual processes, the balance of suppositions held by the viewer. It is this balance she seeks to reveal.

Wanting Wang, “Liquid Confessions I”, 2025, canvas print, 20 x 20 cm (series)

Wang describes her practice as one that seeks “not resolution but friction—spaces where contradictions coexist: beauty in decay, structure in fragmentation, resistance in silence.” It is a position that refuses easy answers, preferring instead to hold multiple truths in suspension. Her work often begins, she notes, with “moments when things go slightly wrong, an object placed in the wrong spot, a routine that suddenly feels absurd, a system that quietly fails.” These observations ferment into images that carry an undertow of unease, asking viewers to notice the contradiction between surface calm and inner collapse.

Wang remains an artist exploring the limits of her practice, but the work produced so far demonstrates a mature grasp of visual tension. She captures the paradoxes of existence with a directness that transcends technical proficiency. Photography as a medium can obscure authorship, appearing to privilege the subject over the maker, but Wang’s voice is increasingly present across her body of work. With upcoming exhibitions at The House of Smalls Art Gallery in Edinburgh and CICA Museum in Korea, and her first solo show in London scheduled for early 2026, the arc of her practice continues to unfold. It is a trajectory worth following closely.

Wanting Wang Artist Website

Selected Exhibitions

Images courtesy of the artist © Wanting Wang
This review is part of a supported series on emerging artists including Wanting Wang. Edited by Kailas Elmer

A. Tonnerre

Ex-London based reader of art and culture. LSE Masters Graduate. Arts and Culture writer since 1995 for Future Publishing, Conde Nast, Wig Magazine and Oyster. Specialist subjects include; media, philosophy, cultural aesthetics, contemporary art and French wine. When not searching for road-worn copies of eighteenth-century travelogues he can be found loitering in the inspirational uplands of art galleries throughout Europe.

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