Long Museum (West Bund) will present the solo exhibition Along the Riverbank by artist Wang Yi from April 12th to June 29th, 2025. The exhibition showcases Wang Yi's recent artworks, including oil on linen, encaustic on wood panel, and preparatory sketches.  

As the highly representative Landscape Series in Wang Yi's practice, this exhibition will continue to focus on the extension of the imagery of Boat and River within this series, presenting Wang Yi's contemporary reflections on natural ecology and humanistic landscapes through multi-dimensional visual language. The exhibition not only showcases the latest masterpieces of this series but also presents a complete overview of the artist's creative process from initial sketches to the final works.

About the Artist

Wang Yi, born in 1984, works and lives in Shanghai. He earned a BA in painting from Fine Art College of Shanghai University and an MFA in painting from New York Academy of Art. After returning to China in 2010, he has been deeply engaged in artistic creation and has successively won awards such as The Third New Star Art Festival Emerging Artist Prize (2012) and The Fifth John Moores New Painting Prize (China) (2018).

Wang Yi’s artistic creation has undergone significant transformation: in his early works, he focused on landscapes. In the Journey to the Secret Land Series since 2019，Wang Yi first achieved the visual superposition of textual narrative and personal experience, establishing a unique system of image rhetoric. In his recent works，he has deconstructed and reconstructed classic fairy tales, using a rich and bright color palette to construct surreal scenes that blend childlike charm with dark aesthetics. Wang Yi deliberately avoids definite expressions, instead capturing the dramatic tension generated by random brushstrokes and disordered compositions, forming a highly recognizable and humorous visual language.

Wang Yi has held several solo exhibitions in important art institutions, including Bowers Museum in Los Angeles, USA (2010), Lingang Contemporary Art Museum (2019), Powerlong Museum (2020), Aurora Museum (2023), and Shanghai Jiushi Art Museum (2025). His works are collected by many institutions such as Bowers Museum, Powerlong Museum, Shanghai Jiushi Art Museum, as well as by private collectors.