Birgit Szepanski

An exhibition's title creates the context in order to closer define what is displayed there, to designate and serve as a reminder, as the exhibition's memorabilia or label. They also function as an element of communication between the various groups of interest involved on the art market. What are your own views on your chosen title Common Interest?

Tian Tian Wang

In a sense common interest, or common understanding of a topic can impact or designate to a great extent. We meet and get together to make decisions and keep various systems updated. Nowadays there are many online communities from which we can tell with whom we have things in common.
If we look closely and analyse this information as statements, we can understand a lot, for example that sympathy is the intersection of the common thread. As a painter I'm interested in a variety of subjects - that is, both aesthetic and intellectual aspects. Many of these themes provide me with a reason for a motive, a painterly element. In my exhibition Common Interest I'm displaying paintings with various motifs in a combination of oil painting and small paper works. This show concept can also be understood as a form of "listed information". The term "common interest" provides for a multifarious array of interpretations. On a purely linguistic level Common Interest simply stands for interests we have in common.
However, these common interests can be things from our daily lives. On the other hand, these interests can be of intellectual or economical nature. The pluralism of the term allows for an open spectrum of possibilities and it is exactly that openness which I'm trying to capture with my work.

Birgit Szepanski

The combination of drawings and paintings reveals aside from the curatorial interest your positioning as a painter. The paintings on paper and canvas have the same status in the exhibition: what relationships or distinctions do you see in the formulations on paper and canvas?

Tian Tian Wang

My paper works are usually based on a small format, and very often on waterborne paint; these are rather 'fleeting materials', such as aquarelles or gouaches. The process is similar to drawings and requires a shorter amount of time, as well as a shorter concentration span. This allows for more occurrences of accidental effects and openness, whereby the paper works always remain autonomous artworks. Within those, figurative elements arise which again can advect as isolated and autonomous shapes into an oil painting. The oil paintings are in a way more dense and immersive in the making, as they require more time and space. This circumstance simply provides other scopes during the process of painting. The elaboration and decision processes are different ones.

Birgit Szepanski

Your motifs are versatile; they constantly change and alternate. There are theme groups, which interest you most at times and in which you engage yourself intensively. For example in your compositions that remind of landscapes, where we can sometimes find hints of human civilization while at other times these seem to be missing altogether. Or the things, that one could describe as objects, such as lorries, chimneys, fires, buildings, which all dissipate into an ambivalence of a sort, as silhouettes and shapes conjoin with other movement patterns such as smoke, clouds or vaultings and bulges. What do - on a formal and textual level - the parameters change and focusing mean to you?

Tian Tian Wang

To me, the choice of motifs such as chimneys, fires in buildings, busses and lorries combine the realm of the intellect and aesthetics. It is my intention to use the aesthetics of painting, to emphasise the objectivity of actualities through natural phenomena like burning, chimneys emitting smoke and floods, in order to move fixed thought patterns in people. The motifs deriving from nature or architectural elements are of particular interest to me because of their unambiguity and unadulteratedness. Precisely because of this aspect those motifs to me are unfading. Overall I'm interested in many very different subjects and motifs, but I also return to certain subjects, time after time, because to me they posses a universal topicality.

Birgit Szepanski

There is an incisive ambiguity in your paintings. One can sense other domains such as those of poetry, humour and transcendence. Which significance do these subject areas have to you?

Tian Tian Wang

Painting, and the painting itself, is in any case paramount - to me this involves an authentic artistic language, an intellectual subject and the question, whether every single painting turned out well
A beauty is desirable but to just worship the aesthetics of painting isn't enough. We live in a global environment. The current time is extremely interesting, although everything but optimistic. We constantly search with entirely different ways answers to questions, which we ourselves, because of our limited horizon, can't answer. This multitude of information or the conscience about it, are present during the process of painting. However, this multitude of information is so vast and intangible that to me there can be no clear distinction between the many contents and ultimately, everything remains an animated process.
This conscience is important when painting those works, but ultimately I don't find direct answers, and therefore convey all those thoughts into my painting, so that my painting becomes that, which finally stays and is important to me. My finished work is the result of intellectual and aesthetic processes of allowing and omitting. Painting is a process of constant questioning, and a manifestation of my personal artistic stance.

Birgit Szepanski

Where or/and with which other artists would you like to exhibit together one day?

Tian Tian Wang

That's a difficult question. I can't prematurely rule out that, which isn't going to be interesting. Since sculpting, film, music or literature inspire my artistic work, I think that all of these scopes are of importance to me as an artist, and that I would find it exciting to be exhibiting together with such artistic forms of expression.

interview with Birgit Szepanski (originally in German) Berlin, February 2011 Translation: Kristina Thomas