UCCA proudly presents a talk with Wang Xingwei during his milestone retrospective. While Wang’s early works contain some of the most astute dialogues with Western art history and critiques of the fraught situation of Chinese artists ever produced in China, he quickly tired of this type of referentiality, which has since become a major trend among the younger generation. In the early and mid-2000s, during an extended sojourn in Shanghai, he developed a distinct world of characters and styles, and a painting based on conscious variation and repetition among these. Nurses, golfers, airline stewardesses, penguins, pandas, old ladies, and cartoon lovers appear and disappear, flickering through Wang’s painterly consciousness, hiding for years at a time, and reappearing undeterred. Like John Currin or George Condo, Wang Xingwei is deeply proficient in numerous painting styles, borrowing entire regimens of technique as if appropriating readymades. Wang Xingwei has been actively reluctant to narrate his own work. This UCCA talk provides a unique opportunity to hear the artist talk about his life and career.