Wang Yiya: Sacred Cow

Text/Yuana

In the aftermath of Wang Mang’s usurpation of the Han dynasty, the Western Han scholar Yang Xiong composed The Adulation of Qin and the Eulogy of Xin (Ju Qin Mei Xin), ostensibly praising the new regime while in fact condemning Qin rule. There, he wrote of “exalted statutes and splendid measures, golden codes and jade laws” (yi lu jia liang, jin ke yu tiao). Later generations distilled this into the phrase jin ke yu lu (Sacred Cow), denoting an immutable, sacrosanct principle. In contemporary discourse, however, its meaning has shifted, acquiring a distinctly postmodern irony. Wang Yiya’s practice incisively seizes upon this transformation: through visual narrative she renders tangible the paradoxes of traditional ethics, peeling back their polished and graceful veneer to reveal the cruelty and bitterness beneath.

Sacred Cow resembles an inscription engraved upon jade—crystalline, yet severe. Gazing upon those ritual codes enshrined as immutable standards across generations, one discerns the systemic oppression embedded within. Moral authority, masked as propriety, has long been wielded as a scepter of power, arrogating to itself the right to govern the destinies of others. This dynamic is particularly stark within gender hierarchies: practices such as the cultural privileging of men over women function like invisible shackles, binding bodies while corroding spirits. Women, subjected to the double burden of entrenched traditions and internalized self-denial, have long borne the crushing weight of this dual oppression. Wang poses the urgent question: is the halo admired by the world still worth reverence if it is purchased at the cost of truth and freedom?

I. The World of Sentient Beings

“Who was the first to sow the seed of passion at the dawn of chaos?” (Dream of the Red Chamber, Prelude). Cao Xueqin’s question resounds as if knocking at the gates of Heaven and Earth, inscribing a riddle for humankind at the very inception of time. From the transcendent into the mundane, “emotion” ignites the vibrancy of life, casting brilliance across the ordinary span of years; yet it also spins the intricate web of entanglements, through which humanity experiences both ecstasy and sorrow. People gather because of emotion, and part because of emotion; the waxing and waning of existence in Wang Yiya’s work emerges like hidden brocade woven into plain silk.

In The World of Red Dust, she depicts the sumptuous splendor of the Grand View Garden: mist coils between pavilions, lanterns shimmer, silk sleeves and crimson scarves mingle within ornate chambers, and human figures throng in luxury at its height. As a “temporary paradise,” the garden bears countless yearnings, where flames of passion blaze within each destiny, saturating the canvas with emotional intensity. Prosperity and decline shadow one another, for, as Xu Angfa once wrote, “A hundred plays are staged in the brocade of life; the foolish girl and the infatuated youth never perceive its illusion.” Infatuated souls plunge themselves willingly into this world, like moths to a flame, into tenderness and ardor alike. Even when passion is burned to ash, the lingering embers and scattered fragments stir young hearts with sudden force.

In Luminous Festival, Wang introduces a video installation for the first time. The chiming of wind bells, the murmur of flowing water, and fragments of human voices blend with warm, luminous shadows filtering through silk, like the pulse of time quivering between reality and illusion. Nocturne, by contrast, is suffused with cool tones; the architecture remains, yet people are gone, evoking the long vigil of night. The world of sentience is always staged at the threshold between life and death. Thus, artistic creation ceases to be mere scenic depiction and becomes instead a vehicle for manifesting existence itself. Flourishing and desolation, entanglement and abandonment—the trajectory of “emotion” becomes a shadowed river, both nourishing life and compelling us to face the unavoidable truth.

II. Sovereign Glory

It is said, “The Rainbow Skirt danced across a thousand peaks; descending at last it shattered the heart of the Central Plain” (Du Mu, Verses on the Huaqing Palace). At the summit of delight, human splendor appears pushed to its limits—yet within its dazzling brilliance lurks fracture, for beauty at its zenith already carries the seed of its own extinction.

Wang Yiya’s celebrated series Queen's Crown, epitomizes this paradox, visualizing the dialectic between magnificence and void. She frames the works with the headdress of a Song dynasty empress—the Nine-Dragon Hairpin Crown—into which she places the Queen Mother of the West and her retinue of celestial maidens. Blossoms scatter across the sky, auspicious clouds curl, ornate objects overlap in profusion, their symbols colliding into a suffocating spectacle of dislocated time and overwhelming grandeur. Yet in her rendering, opulent surfaces and hollow interiors stand in stark counterpoint. Wang does not dismiss splendor outright; rather, with poetic strokes and near-obsessive attention, she elevates it to its utmost limit, while simultaneously inscribing within the composition the inevitability of collapse. Thus magnificence and ruin coexist within a single tableau, engendering a tragic beauty whose allure intensifies precisely because of the cold lucidity beneath.

“Generation after generation, life is endless; year after year, the river moon remains the same” (Zhang Ruoxu, Spring River, Flowers, and Moonlit Night). The world appears eternal, the moon unchanged. Yet in this continuity of glory, Wang tears the garment of ornate narrative to expose its hidden mechanism: history-writing often transfigures individual anguish and blood into ornamental embellishment of grand narratives. Splendor thus becomes a double signifier—at once the apex of intoxication and the harbinger of futility. Her work unfolds within this tension, using sumptuous visions to provoke contemplation of inner void, surrendering fully to release in order to reveal truth laid bare.

III. Predestination

Only by penetrating beyond appearances can one approach essence. After passing through love and hatred, honor and humiliation, one perceives in late years the shadow of predestination, illuminating the futility of resisting reality. Without tragedy, there is no extremity; without extremity, no ultimate beauty. As The Book of Liezi states: “Life and death alike, neither object nor self—this is fate.” Yet human effort itself may well be part of destiny’s design. Still, humanity resists dissolution, infusing fate with deepest feeling, endowing it with fervor, sorrow, and obsession. Tragedy thereby becomes a wellspring of inspiration, seeding infinite possibility within the cracks of inevitability. Art thus transcends ethical binaries, no longer oriented toward good or evil, but toward unveiling truth. Wang paints beauty from pain, transforming inescapable destiny into a visible scene. Her art seeks no redemption; its task is revelation, allowing a glimmer of compassion to appear even beneath the crushing weight of fate.

Wang’s installation, The Longing, marks her first large-scale endeavor: a five-meter-high “wishing tree,” reminiscent of temples or tourist shrines, but here laden with somber meaning. Iron chains hang heavy; ribbons and bells cascade in layers, like the cries of multitudes. Desire is repackaged as wish, steering the course of destiny, tightening the iron law of fate. A “tree” should symbolize growth and vitality, yet here its feral energy is built from the heap of human longing. Collective prayers congeal into burdensome shackles. The ribbons bound to iron chains flutter as credos, but also constrict like climbing ropes. The harder one struggles to escape, the deeper one is ensnared, wounded by the sharp recoil of desire. The Longing is more than an image of yearning: it is a philosophical metaphor of predestination. Wishes may seem beautiful, but their endless accumulation unveils suffering’s face. Fate does not reside elsewhere, but in the bottomless abyss of the human heart.

Among social structures, gender oppression is the most immediate. Wang’s Admonitions for Women series draws inspiration from her lived experience. While transcribing Ban Zhao’s Eastern Han text Admonitions for Women—a didactic manual prescribing female conduct—she confronted admonitions at once grandiose and absurd: women should crawl beneath beds to display submission, weave and cook for guests, remain silent in public, eschew adornment in private. Canonized as a model “textbook,” Admonitions for Women converted Confucian values into everyday shackles for women. Seemingly upright, it covertly enacted discipline and domination. Wang reflects: we are accustomed to luxuriating in the ornate imagery of classical literature, yet seldom pause to confront its dross and decay. Art can reveal this duality, bringing obscured aspects back into sight. Accordingly, Admonitions for Women becomes a visual allegory of power’s oppression. On canvas, traditional corsets—decorated with blossoms, lace, or forged from iron—trace the contours of female form, disregarding physiology or practicality. Cold wires intersect the image like canes, while meticulously copied maxims of East and West fill the background, resembling patriarchal spells engraved into cultural DNA. This “persecution in the name of fulfillment” proliferates across cultures, growing ever more refined, until no visible wound remains.

IV. The Other Shore

Delusion produces emptiness; upon emptiness the world is erected.

When illusion clarifies into pure land, perception itself becomes the sentient realm.

——Śūraṅgama Sūtra

Through the turbulence of life—joy and sorrow, union and parting—humankind learns that all phenomena are suffering, that prosperity and decline are transient. Occasionally, a fleeting clarity arises, granting a moment of release, as though the soul transcends worldly fetters, roaming freely between Heaven and Earth. At last one understands that all attachments are but illusions, like dreams and shadows, devoid of fixed essence. No longer bound by craving or enslaved by anguish, life refines itself into transcendental insight, journeying toward a deeper, more luminous realm.

Lu Guimeng, in his Entering the Cave of Linwu (Poems on Lake Tai), wrote: “Bowing down I glimpse purple mist; looking up I hear the chant of clouds. Who could know this true spiritual land, untouched by the mortal world?” This “true spiritual land” is the dwelling of immortals, sealed from dust, apart from the profane—a metaphor for the heart’s release from attachment in order to enter transcendence. Wang’s Ethereal Domain invokes this imagery: the canvas, suffused in pink tones, exudes a gentle serenity; pavilions loom faintly within mist, opening an inner sanctuary for viewers. The “refuge” is none other than the heart’s own ethereal expanse, where worldly turmoil is suspended, desire subsides into echo, and the soul reflects upon itself, returning to origin.

In The Cloud Coffer Mountain, Wang draws upon the Daoist classic Cloud Coffer in Seven Sections. She envisions not a terrestrial locale but a conjured paradise. Though women in antiquity were socially marginalized, Daoist cosmology granted them a rightful place. As Dao De Jing states: “All things bear the feminine and embrace the masculine; harmony arises from their union.” Unlike Confucian hierarchy, which elevates yang and suppresses yin, Daoism regards yin and yang as coequal polarities, mutually dependent and transformative. The painting depicts verdant mountains, birds soaring aloft, noblewomen seated in solitary contemplation or gathered in ease, their expressions serene—an imagined utopia for women. No absurd dogmas, no rigid stratifications—only reciprocal harmony and unbounded joy. This vision directly contrasts the Admonitions for Women: bondage on one side, free wandering with all beings on the other. Viewers oscillate between these poles, as though passing from struggle to clarity, with accumulated grief dissolving into sudden illumination.

Returning to nature is not exile but passage. As Diamond Sutra teaches: “To reach the other shore, one must rely on wisdom… When the mind is deluded, this shore; when the mind awakens, the other shore.” Wang’s work is like a fragile skiff ferrying us from worldly illusion toward spiritual clarity. In the cycle of splendor and ruin, confinement and liberation, the audience perceives that the “other shore” is not an elsewhere but a release within: the heart unbound from fixation, finding beauty in tragedy, and freedom within impermanence.