Dreaming in Color: The Imaginative Paintings of Xinyu Wo

By PAUL LASTER, May 5, 2025 

Since childhood, Chinese artist Xinyu Wo has been captivated by drawing from her imagination, gaining energy from her creations. By the age of ten, she was creating paintings. Inspired by the subject matter and palettes of paintings by Cézanne, Chagall, and other European Modernists and Old Masters she discovered in art books, she pursued art as a passion.

Although she didn’t study art in high school in China, she decided to follow her dream in college. She graduated with a bachelor’s degree from the China Academy of Art in Hangzhou in 2018 and, after receiving encouragement from a professor to study abroad, earned an MFA in 2021 from New York’s School of Visual Arts, where she studied painting and video with Mika Rottenberg, David Rowe, and Mark Tribe. While working odd jobs in education and interning at a gallery, Wo dedicated herself to her studio practice, spending all her free time there. By the fall of 2022, it had become her full-time profession.

Xinyu Wo, Reflection, 2022. Oil on wood panel, 11 x 14 in (27.94 x 35.56 cm). Courtesy the artist and VillageOneArts, New York
 

Opportunities to showcase her videos and paintings first emerged in Shanghai and Nanjing, even while she was still in school. Her initial group show in New York occurred in Chelsea at VillageOneArt, where she has since participated in additional group exhibitions and held two solo shows. 

Her 2023 one-person exhibition at VillageOneArt—"Starry Heavens, Moral Law"—offered dreamlike visual narratives that explored our shared humanity with an erotic twist. Playfully portraying people and spirits in nature, her paintings examined mindfulness with a bit of humor. Reflection (2022), a small-scale painting on a wood panel, depicts a young, faceless female nude standing before a mirror on the edge of a cliff, with an older naked woman behind the mirror, who may be a mother or a later version of the primary subject. 

Xinyu Wo, The Irresponsible Internship At the Memory Store, 2023. Oil on canvas, 60 x 72 in (152.4 x 182.88 cm). Courtesy the artist and VillageOneArts, New York
 

On a grander scale, The Irresponsible Internship At the Memory Store (2023), a painting on canvas, depicts a daydreaming male clerk at a counter surrounded by anthropomorphic pots and plants. Painted in soft, pastel palettes, these works capture their subjects in otherworldly realms, reflecting an in-between state that immigrants often experience and express. 

Her second solo show at VillageOneArt, "The Rift of Perception," which opened in December 2024 and continued into January of this year, imagined segments of a different reality. It featured large-scale paintings that combined perspectives of reality with a thoughtful examination of our views of the world around us, inspired by Surrealist painters like Dorothea Tanning and Leonora Carrington, as if they were transported to an era influenced by artificial intelligence (a technology Wo refuses to use in her art).

Xinyu Wo, The Marriage of Figaro, 2024. Oil on canvas, 60 x 48 in (152.4 x 121.92 cm. Courtesy the artist and VillageOneArts, New York) 
 

Her dreamlike canvas, Another Day in Spring (2024), portrays three synchronized female performers who mythologically worship the sun, surrounded by swaying trees and giant, bending penises, as more miniature androgynous figures fall from the sky. The Marriage of Figaro (2024) is a marvelous, burnt sienna-colored monochrome depicting a nude, erect male one step ahead of the bride as they flee the church with a procession of others in pursuit. And The Only Human I Loved With (2024) portrays a long-haired, nude male cello player serenading a robotic princess in an enchanting Garden of Eden-type setting.

Xinyu Wo, The Only Human I In Loved With, 2024. Oil on canvas, 60 x 60 in (152.4 x 152.4 cm). Courtesy the artist and VillageOneArts, New York
 

The exhibition alluded to the dreams and aspirations we could achieve if our imagined worlds came alive. It offered open-ended stories and a desire for connection amidst technological distractions, with Wo skillfully linking the content to our cultural moment and encouraging her peers to reflect on their experiences. Her work presents themes in contemporary art that have been underexplored, pushing the boundaries of artistic expression through a distinctive visual language and innovative narrative structures. Exploring the tension between humanity, nature, and new technologies, she takes painting into new realms. WM