Winner of the Sigg Prize 2023, Beijing-based artist Wang Tuo excavates the fractures of Chinese modernity with the patience of an archivist and the instincts of a storyteller. Working primarily in moving images, he builds dense psychological allegories out of personal memory and collective history. In Meditation on Disappointing Reading (2016), a daughter in exile tries to summon her mother’s spirit by recreating the dishes of her lost Shanghai childhood. The Interrogation (2017) and its later, more vertiginous counterpart, The Second Interrogation (2023), turn the mechanics of vetting onto the state’s psychic grip and its reach into the Chinese art world. In The Northeast Tetralogy (2018–21), arguably his most important work to date, Wang braids folklore, ghost stories, and historical narratives through a concept he calls “pan-shamanization”—a fluid channel between temporalities and dimensions. Layered and incantatory, his cinema insists that art must be as tangled as the world it seeks to reflect. This year, after debuting The Experimental Paradigm of Ownership and Autonomy (2026) in the group show “Canicula” at the Fondazione In Between Art Film in Venice, and Ratchet Drill (2026) at the 16th Gwangju Biennale—both part of his ongoing quadrilogy—Wang will open a major solo exhibition at Hong Kong’s Tai Kwun in February 2027. In our forthcoming Mar/Apr 2027 issue, we turn to his practice and its meditation on absence, memory, and the recurring cycles of control and amnesia.

Louis Lu is an associate editor at ArtAsiaPacific.