-Wenjue-
About the Artist: Born in 2001 in Beijing, currently based in Shanghai.
ART021 Booth: BANK (Shanghai, New York) | Booth C06
At this year's fair, BANK takes a distinct path by presenting a solo project, Choose Your Own Adventure: Prologue, by Wenjue—the youngest artist currently represented by the gallery. Based in Shanghai, Wenjue focuses on reconfiguring the traditional medium of oil painting. Through layered pigment and tangible texture, he pushes the dialogue between two-dimensional painting and three-dimensional relief, infusing images with new spatial and narrative potential.
His work often merges comic-inspired storytelling with the compositional logic of religious altarpieces, collaging diverse cultural vocabularies into a single frame—visually striking, yet rich with symbolism and metaphor.
The new series shown at ART021 SHANGHAI continues the artist’s ongoing exploration. Inspired by his childhood impulse to “deconstruct and reassemble” video games, as well as his fascination with anime, religious iconography, and medieval manuscripts, Wenjue treats painting as a “game with designable rules”—setting, breaking, and reordering visual logic on the canvas. To him, each piece is a play between the virtual and the real: figures and symbols intersect through veils of color, subtly evoking the complex structures of human connection, desire, and emotion. Viewers are invited into a “super-daily” perceptual field—a space for continuous exploration, choice, and becoming. With the sharpness and imagination emblematic of his generation, Wenjue expands the possibilities of contemporary painting in a new media context.
Wenjue traveled to France in 2015, studying at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière in Paris, and entered the studio of François Legrand in 2016. By 18, he had become a lifelong member of the Fondation Taylor. In recent years, he has been active in exhibitions and art fairs, including his 2023 solo show Hyperobject: Cornucopia at BANK, and group exhibitions such as The World Itself Dreams (BANK, 2025), Birds of a Dream (Tang Contemporary Art, Hong Kong Wong Chuk Hang, 2023), and Playground of Youth: Case Studies in New Chinese Painting (I) (Yours Gallery, 2023). His works are held in institutional collections including START Museum, Xinyi Art Museum, Whale Museum (Singapore), and Boa Música (Spain).
Notably, this May, Wenjue participated in the second edition of the Esther Art Fair as a BANK artist, showing work at the Estonian House in New York—further raising his international profile. BANK founder Mathieu Borysevicz first discovered the young artist through social media.
