Hai Gallery is pleased to announce “Present Tense”, a forthcoming exhibition comprised entirely of new works by Jia Jia Wang.

The Beijing-born artist, who moved to London at an early age before returning to his native China in 2009, explores the notion of identity and the dilemma of ‘belonging’ in much of his work. In “Present Tense”, Wang further confronts this theme, grappling with a society in a state of flux and the changing values associated with a changed world.

The 13 new works portray a supernatural, melancholic world using a variety of eclectic imagery borrowed from the disparate worlds of science fiction and traditional landscape painting. Hovering between abstraction, realism and landscape, the paintings present dystopian wastelands interrupted by neon lines and juxtaposed with mountains, rocks and streams.

Fragments of life – faces and fractured houses – tease through the images hinting at displacement and “hang in the paintings like pathetic Super Mario scenery filler, comedic and tragic all at once, for them there is no escape; they are doomed to exist in a world in which they can neither move nor escape” (Jia Jia Wang).

These strange new worlds, menacing and threatening in their outlook but affording momentary glimpses of light, fluctuate between distant past and sci-fi future and call into question what existing in the ‘Present Tense’ is all about; exploring not just what it means to live in the ‘now’, but also the tension that arises in the moment between past and future.