Xiyao Wang

Xiyao Wang was born in 1992 in Chongqing, China. She trained first at the Sichuan Fine Arts Institute in Chongqing, completing a BA there in 2014, then moved to Germany for a second BA at the HFBK, University of Fine Arts of Hamburg, completed in 2018. She went on to an MFA at HFBK, finished in 2020, which included an exchange period studying at the State University of New York at Purchase in 2018 and 2019.

Her paintings are large, immersive abstractions built up in oil, acrylic, chalk, graphite, and oil stick, often given poetic or mythic titles drawn from landscape and folklore, among them On the Way to Penglai Island, The Crystalline Moon Palace, and The Drifting Island. Early solo shows at Soy Capitan and Paul Roosen Contemporary in Germany in 2019 were followed within a few years by representation from Konig Galerie, Massimo De Carlo, Perrotin, and Tang Contemporary Art, and by solo exhibitions and fair projects in Berlin, Paris, New York, Milan, Seoul, Bangkok, Mexico City, and Dubai. She currently lives and works in Berlin.

Coverage of Wang to date is concentrated in gallery texts and art-market press rather than signed reviews in major critical outlets, so no verbatim critical assessment can be attributed here with confidence. Artnet News has profiled her work as part of a broader wave of Chinese-born, Western-trained women artists born in the 1990s gaining rapid gallery support, describing her paintings' seasonal, dance-like quality in its own reporting. Her exhibition history, spanning Song Art Museum in Beijing, the Bangkok Art Biennale, and solo projects at Art Basel and Frieze London with her representing galleries, points to institutional and market interest that has developed largely since 2022.

Wang's secondary market is still young. Her earliest recorded auction sale was High Summer, no. 2, which sold for HK$508,000 at Phillips Hong Kong on 1 April 2023. Phillips Hong Kong then sold The Crystalline Moon Palace no. 4 for HK$571,500 on 26 November 2024, and that result was surpassed a few months later when Phillips London sold On the way to Penglai Island No. 2 for GBP 88,900 (about USD 114,700) on 7 March 2025, which stands as her current auction high. The roughly two-year span across these three results is consistent with the broader pattern Artnet has reported of Western galleries moving quickly to represent Chinese-born women painters of her generation.

Wang's market history is short: her known auction results run from April 2023 into 2025, and there is no catalogue raisonne, appropriate for a working artist still early in her career. Her strongest signal for a collector is the breadth of her gallery representation across Europe, Asia, and the Middle East, rather than a long, seasoned auction record. With only a small number of public sales to date, any single result should be read as an early data point rather than an established price trend, and provenance should be checked directly with her representing galleries.