Revisiting the Past to Chart the Future: The Art of Angela Wei

Angela Wei, Garden of Eden, 2024. Courtesy the artist.

By PAUL LASTER, December 13, 2024 

Born in China, raised in Canada, and educated in the United States, Angela Wei creates art that explores the loss of identity in an alienating world, the negative impact of technology abuse, and the fight for self-actualization. Wei, the daughter and granddaughter of traditional Chinese artists, is a storyteller.

Trained at Barnard College of Columbia University and Parsons School of Design, the 24-year-old artist worked as a Curatorial Fellow for the Robert Lehman Collection at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 2022 and, in the same year, exhibited her artwork in a group show curated by Piper Marshall at the Louise McCagg Gallery at Barnard.

 Angela Wei, Navigator, 2021. Courtesy the artist.
 

While still in college, she had the opportunity to serve as the lead designer in creating 30 billboards for Vice Media, advertising Investigation Night, a documentary series on Vice TV that shed light on previously unexplored aspects of true crime stories and the individuals behind them.

Following her departure from school, she devoted herself to writing, authoring articles on beauty, fashion, design, architecture, and fine art for prominent publications such as Garage, Fashionista, Elle, Surface, Architectural Digest, and Christie’s Online Magazine, before eventually returning to her first passion, painting.

Angela Wei, Superposition, 2022. Courtesy the artist.
 

Wei has refocused on painting, resulting in increased opportunities to showcase her work, including exhibitions at Chambers Fine Art’s Ai Weiwei-designed space in Salt Point, New York, during the 2023 Upstate Art Weekend, as well as a group show at New York’s Rachel Uffner Gallery and a solo exhibition, titled “Neither here nor there,” at The Living Gallery in Brooklyn in 2024.

At The Living Gallery, she showed a selection of paintings from 2021 to 2024. Navigator, from 2021, and 2022’s Superposition portray adventurous female figures in dreamlike realms. With only starfish covering her private parts, her navigator character boldly paddles through rough waters on a giant shell followed by a flock of birds. Soaring above abandoned boats and children’s birthday cakes, she’s headed toward a new world.

Angela Wei, Dreamscape, 2023. Courtesy the artist.

In Superposition, however, the female protagonist sits nude on a giant mushroom amid an Alice in Wonderland fantasy world as blue meteorites blaze past. Wearing Virtual Reality glasses and manipulating the controls, she is absorbed in a vibrant flow of imaginary figures and forms. Little devils parachute down with bows and arrows ready to shoot while a candelabra, bees, and butterflies float above, and a giant rabbit scurries past her feet. Her long, winding locks drape over a pile of books, suggesting that the psychological source of the tale is filtered through fiction.

Angela Wei, Odyssey. 2024. Courtesy the artist.
 

Dreamscape, from 2023, presents a scholar’s rock transformed into an underwater scene, where two red-finned fairies—one joyful, one sad—are swimming through perforations in the rock. Three fish appear to be mystically rising from the rock while rusty chains, symbols of the constriction the artist sometimes feels, are attached to its surface. Relatedly, since it also references Wei’s Asian heritage, her 2024 painting Odyssey depicts a young woman pulling an abstract cart holding a spirited figure composed of a pumpkin, lotus flowers, and a cabbage.  On a journey through time and space with a white dove at the spirit’s side, the painting pays homage to Wei’s grandmother, who made traditional Chinese flower and bird drawings.

Angela Wei, City of Angels, 2023. Courtesy the artist.

In the 2023 City of Angels painting, she depicts classical columns falling through an imploding city, with haloed angels playfully flying through the tableau. Skillfully illustrated, the narrative resembles a scene from an animated film, while the shattering psychological storyline is cloaked in colorful cuteness. Meanwhile, Descent From Babel, created in 2024, is set in another architectural realm. Capturing two angelic kid boxers descending through the center of a temple, the painting portrays them battling with balls of fire surrounding them as they plunge from a heavenly realm into a black hole.

Angela Wei, Descent From Babel, 2024. Courtesy the artist.

Wei also revisits childlike scenarios in two recent paintings, including The Garden of Eden, which resembles a Max Fleischer cartoon from the 1930s, where flora and fauna are anthropomorphized, and children are joyfully caught amid the action. The artist made an aesthetic shift from the characteristic flatness of most other paintings by using a sponging technique to dapple the color on the canvas, a method she had previously employed in her 2022 painting, Superposition.

Angela Wei, The Great Escape, 2024. Courtesy the artist.
 

The Great Escape, also from 2024, pictures children in an enclosed garden. Protected by a bubble, where everything is lush inside but withering beyond its edges, two girls attempt to escape the realm of innocence while another girl tries to capture one of them with a net, and a boy swings through the scene like Tarzan on a vine. A visual metaphor for the artist’s attempt to return to that moment in her youth when creative endeavors were her primary pursuit, the painting charts Wei’s course for the future. WM