Artist: Shiwen Wang

Michael Kohn Gallery presents The river returns nothing of what it takes, an exhibition of new works by London-based, Chinese artist Shiwen Wang. For her first solo exhibition with the gallery and in the United States, Wang presents a series of 10 new abstract compositions that piece together the artist’s recurring explorations of natural life and its impermanence.

In The river returns nothing of what it takes, Wang engages with the relationship between humanity and the natural world, or as she describes it: “the unity of cosmic life.” The river functions as a metaphor for loss, fleeting time, and collapse intertwined with creation. There is a vanitas quality to the paintings; a subtle rot of human interference lurking beneath the iridescence. In the diptych Belakang Mati, an expansive blue is continued into a narrow rectangular panel below where the belly of a fish unseams open in putrefaction– the viewer bearing witness to its decay.

Wang’s dynamic picture planes emerge from her acute understanding of the fundamental fluidity between artificial and natural light. Her earth-toned and aquatic palettes summon an intuitive command of color, while layers of impastoed oils, powder pigment, beeswax, and fragile egg tempera approximate an aged patina. Her subject matter appropriates the familiar – fish, decaying leaves, a boat wreckage – and translates it into the unfamiliar. These recognizable, repetitive relics visualize the compression of time and create complex ecosystems which toggle between the natural and synthetic.

In spatial harmony, Wang’s work fuses together the relationship between the past and the present, and organic cycles of decay and rebirth. The artist explains the exhibition title references a line found in a novel, written by French author Sylvain Tesson, titled “A Life to Sleep Outside”《츱흼트퇀》: “The river returns nothing, not even the echoes of a cry.” Wang writes, “The violence and suffocating helplessness in the face of life’s impermanence aligns perfectly with the emotional landscape I aim to evoke in my paintings. The river is not just a natural element, but a container—both a tangible material and a symbol.”