Vitamin Creative Space at Art Basel | Paris 2026
Wang Yin: The Time That Was Never Promised
Upon the stage that Wang Yin cultivates for the growth of the human spirit, one can faintly discern the ghost of a certain time, drifting through the atmosphere of the picture—like the witches in Shakespeare’s plays, whispering of the unknowns of human destiny.
For Wang Yin, oil painting, as a spectral envoy sent from the process of modernity, compels the artist to respond to the question of “why oil painting.” This has led him to search anew, and in turn to reinvent, the “point of origin” of contemporary Chinese oil painting, and, further, to seek a frame of reference for his own experience.
The Sound of the Xiao is an exploratory work by Xu Beihong (1895-1953), a pioneer of modern Chinese art, made in 1926 during his years studying in France, in which he sought to fuse traditional Chinese pictorial sensibility with the European techniques of oil painting he had acquired abroad. Seventy-nine years later, in 2005, Wang Yin copied this work, enlarging it to twice its original scale and titling it 2084—inviting us to imagine a painting appearing seventy-nine years beyond the moment of 2005. In doing so, the artist inscribes the fictionality of time directly into the medium of oil painting itself.
Within this crevice of time, Wang Yin’s work attempts to embrace and reconstruct a relationship with everything that has come before, as though those landscapes that have grown out of history had never truly passed away. Rather, they continue to endow humanity’s future with meaning. This recalls the question Rainer Maria Rilke poses in Duino Elegies: “Could we do without them?”
Here, forms—the forms of figures and landscapes alike—lean into one another, “nestling” together, condensing into a certain disposition, on the verge of articulation, yet already beyond words. When that young girl, together with the entire expanse of landscape, walks toward us, it is as though we glimpse the two faces of fate—the everyday moment of an individual life and the moment of history—reunited here. It is precisely there that Wang Yin’s paintings foretell a time in which “an era is about to vanish,” a time that was never promised. And it may be there, too, that the form of the human is quietly beginning to take shape.
Galleries
A13
VIP Days (by invitation only)
Wednesday, October 21, 2026, 10 am to 8 pm
Thursday, October 22, 2026,11 am to 8 pm
Vernissage (access with a Vernissage ticket or invitation)
Thursday, October 22, 2026, 2 pm to 8 pm
Public Days (access with a ticket or invitation)
Friday, October 23 – Sunday, October 25, 2026, 11 am to 7 pm
Venue
Grand Palais, 3 avenue du Général Eisenhower, 75008, Paris
Contact mail@vitamincreativespace.com
For more information, please visit
https://vitamincreativespace.com/en/?artist=wang-yin
https://www.artbasel.com