Duncan Wang

Duncan Wang (b. 2000, China) is an artist currently pursuing a master’s degree in economics at Columbia University.

Wang’s practice spans painting, drawing, and mixed media, incorporating acrylic, oil pastel, and ink. His works emerge from sudden impulses—compulsions that demand to be externalized through mark-making. These gestures often form recurring motifs: circles, lines, and the color red. Their symbolic meaning remains elusive, even to the artist himself.

His Chair-Portrait Series reflects his personal interpretation of chairs. To Wang, chairs are more than objects: they possess presence, life, and a peculiar power dynamic with the human body. Another major series, Four Notions of Self, is driven by his internal struggle with identity, a spiritual investigation shaped by Buddhist and Daoist reflections on ego and selfhood.

Rather than treating his works as expressions of fixed meaning, Wang regards them as autonomous events. Once a piece is complete, it detaches from him. Interpretation is neither controlled nor necessary. What matters is that the work came into being—that, for a moment, something passed through.