Wei Ligang

Talented calligraphist and true mathematics genius, Wei Ligang entirely dedicated to calligraphy after he 24 graduated in 1985. He became teacher of calligraphy at the Teacher’s Training School in Taiyuan in 1988. Then, he decided to devote himself more to painting without loosing the link with the calligraphy that considerably influences his art. In his works, Chinese characters aren’t only words referring to a thing anymore but the expression of a very personal artistic process. Evoking sometimes calligraphies made by Henri Michaux, sometimes Jean Dubuffet’s works, the art of Wei Ligang oscillates between figuration and abstraction. Indeed, if the thick material reveals figurative contents with these rows of flowers, these ones are also a pretext for a subtle game on the textures. Moreover, the artist increased his colour palette over the years ; firstly restricting himself to black and white, gold, blue, green and pink are now part of his art. In residency every summer since 2013 at the École des filles and deeply affected by Huelgoat and its forest, just like the poet and Sinologist Victor Segalen was, Wei Ligang reinvent the Occidental abstraction and revolutionise the traditional calligraphy to explore new possibilities of creation. The Cernuschi Museum bought a work created at the École. Today, his work is awarded with the greatest Chinese prizes and bought by worldwide collectors.