Artist Statement:

 

Di Wang (he/him, b. 2004, Shanghai, China) is a multidisciplinary artist based in Toronto and Providence. Through a diverse range of media, Wang explores themes of community, collective memory, and intra-cultural hardships pertinent to his identity, family, and childhood. His practice seeks to illuminate the complex and overlooked realities that shape his multicultural experience. Wang’s practice at large has focused on childhood, homesickness, family, and the immigrant experience. These hardships became both physical and theoretical guiding questions for pieces such as Fortitude (2023), “a solidified memory of leaves from my grandfather’s garden, plants that I never saw bloom”. His current work dives deeply into the cross-sections between individuality and cultural community, commonalities between marginalized identities, vulnerability in exploring selfhood, and the numbness of systemic modernity. Wang’s body of research seeks to exploit this numbness, and reveal the mundane, gray-area, and latent hardships between marginalized groups in the West. As an artist, Wang finds great commitment to and engagement with unearthing these mundane hardships, denormalizing them from the systemic day-to-day. Artistic engagement thus becomes a catalyst for true, grounded progress, and community collaboration, such as his Chimera Adventure (2024) designed for the URI Child Development Center.

 

Driven by a deep commitment to dialogue and connection, Wang engages closely with individuals from a wide range of cultural backgrounds, communities, and lived experiences, a notion he began developing in his pivotal piece, Wisteria (2024). He activates his individual and collective background through culturally imbued materiality, “rice, a foundational representation of the soil on which immigrants grow”. Through conversations, interviews, and collaboration, his work challenges systemic structures while honoring the resilience found in personal narratives. Wang’s body of work reveals itself as a space inherent to truth, reflection, and healing.

 

Wang’s new and upcoming work focuses on framing his key concepts as alive and tender, seeking to understand marginalized hardships as forms of wounds and decay- pertinent topics he has engaged with in Rule (2025). Pondering how to begin healing these wounds, the complexities of stripping back and revealing old ones, and engaging with acts of care as inherent to acts of artmaking.