Brooklyn-based artist Dawei Wang explores alienation on moving to America

His earlier works, as such, often draw on the banal daily activities of life in Shanghai. When Wang moved to America, his works naturally took a rather different turn. Finding himself in a strange new world; he says he immediately felt like a "foreigner", retreating into himself, and becoming an increasingly introverted lifestyle as he "grappled with feelings of alienation in a new environment."

The people in the work Wang went on to make in America become blurred, odd, disquieting; human figures are "literally insecure in their occupation of physical space, reinforcing the tenuous quality of human existence."

Wang’s mixed media pieces use cool, muted colours, heightening that sense of observational unease with various tones of greys, blues, and greens in the background. Flashes of bright red and orange hint at the idea of a warning somehow; and serve to underscore Wang’s explorations of "unity and the tension between falsehood and reality, action and stillness, the physical and waking world."